A Helluva Year Revisited

I mentioned a few wins in the blogs below. Here, for my own record-keeping, is a more complete benchmark of the year gone by:

It’s been satisfying to meet with fellow writers—some seasoned and many neophytes—twice monthly at the Manchester Writers’ Circle. Reading a work aloud and receiving comments on it is a valuable way to review, proof and critique ones own work. We now have our own blogsite, too, at http://sites.google.com/site/manchesterwriters/home.

Publishing short stories and articles are gratifying and personally validating. The works that saw print or appeared online include “Epitaph with Flowers”(February), “Girl Talk” (March) and “Misunderstood Identity” (March 2011) to Big Pulp; “Gothic Revival” (January and later included in its Editor’s Choices), and “Angel in My Coffee Cup” (August) in Bewildering Stories with a probable sale there of “Fish Stories and the Mermaid”; “Footsteps” in Everyday Weirdness (December); “Last Year’s Icon” (February) and “Day of Moving Hell” (July) in Every Day Fiction; “Joined at the Heart” (December) as Gumshoe Review’s first piece of fiction; five short analyses and commentaries on writing to Flash Fiction Chronicles; “Paying the Devil” was awarded 6th place winner in the 79th annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition (October); “Chain of Events” in Over My Dead Body! (July); and “Play Date” in Pif magazine (October).

"Philip's War: America's Most Devastating Conflict," posted to Military History Online, reprinted in The American Museum magazine (May); “Stanley at Shiloh: An Improbable ‘Indiana Jones’” published by Military History Online (July); “There’s More to Jersey Wines than You Think” in two community newspapers (August and September); and eight short humor pieces to The Short Humour Site.

Along the way, a couple of other articles were reprinted and five “flash” reviews were published by the Asbury Park Press. Reading wasn’t stinted, and I plowed through 27 books, three of which were e-books on my new Nook.

One of my favorite children’s-book authors is Holling Clancy Holling, and I got a tip of the hat from the HCH museum in Leslie, Mich., to build a semi-official blogsite as homage to this author, illustrator and naturalist, at http://hollingcholling.blogspot.com/.