Keeping Busy

My writing activities are taking interesting turns. My essay, “Out of the Fog,” is a finalist for A Cup of Comfort for Writers. I’ll know in a few months if it will be one of the essays used in the anthology. My “Worst Western” sentence in the 1996 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest (for the worst opening line in the novel I never wrote) will be published in the next Bulwer-Lytton collection, which will either be titled The Brothers Dark and Stormy or It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: the Second Coming.

If the agent who requested 10 pages of More Peevish Advice—the last four years of my redneck humor columns (which originally appeared in Blue Ridge Traditions and Smith Mountain Eagle)—rejects me, I’ll go POD again. I’ve already got most of my manuscript set up in my computer. I’ll know by the end of the year if Ferradiddledumday, my Blue Ridge version of the Rumpelstiltskin story will be commercially published. Thanks to the AppLit site, teachers around the country are using Ferradiddledumday in class, but many would like a hard copy.

I’m also doing a bunch of writing-related things: I recently became a member of the Roanoke Valley Branch of the American Penwomen. I’m enjoying the heck out of being writer-in-residence for Roanoke County Schools and also mentoring a group of Franklin County Young Writers. At the Virginia Writers Club annual meeting in Charlottesville yesterday, I was elected 1st vice-president of the VWC. Plus, I’m giving editorial input to a couple members of my writers’ group, and advising a few more about starting a blog.

I thought I was going to have plenty of free time in my retirement. The old adage, “Work expands to fit the time available,” is true.