News! Third short story goes to contract!

No, NOT my art. Found it on Pinterest
and would love to give a credit here
if anyone can provide it???

Am very thrilled today, because my third short story has been picked up by a fantasy anthology soon to be published in Queensland. The volume's theme is dragons ... always a favorite subject; and yesterday I signed the contract for Pet Shop Dragons, to appear in Hordes of the Great Fire Wyrms: a dragon anthology, in around June, 2019.

This is tremendous news. It marks my third story in print. The first was Pearls That Were His Eyes, a science fiction piece which appeared in Shoreline of Infinity #11, in the UK. Then came Father O'Neill's Confession, a historical urban fantasy in Terra! Tara! Terror!, from Flatiron Publishing in the US. Pet Shop Dragons could also be called historical urban fantasy, in that it's an a/u 1905, without being even 0.5% steampunk.

So nice to be placing stories here and there! In fact, after doing volumes and volumes of art in the last six months, I need to get my head down and write some more.

See below for the covers to the two issues that are currently in print. I'll blog again when the dragon anthology is released. Might even have sold another short piece by then ... nothing is impossible. I've come to love writing as much as art, so ... let's do this.


Otherwise, things are slow and steady on the run-up to Christmas. The gift shopping is all done, the tree is up, the presents are wrapped -- even half the grocery shopping is done, anything that could be stuffed into the freezer or cupboard. We should be able to sail into the holidays with nothing to do but kick back and enjoy.

This will be our second Christmas without Mom, and I have to be honest: I'm missing her a lot. A few days ago, December 10 would have been her 89th birthday, but in all honesty, with her health so broken down, she's in a better position, watching the festivities from a dimension removed.

(Me? Ha!Torn ligament in lumbar, plantar fasciitis, patella tendinitis, hip bursitis ... and you wonder why I haven't blogged since before I had two surgeries to fix my gallbladder problem last year?! I could tell you a story called Hell Year ... but I won't. Before you were halfway through, you'd be glazed over and reaching for either the vodka or the valium. So I'll spare you, and we'll pick up the pieces and drive onward...)

For the moment, it's mostly about art for me, since I recently discovered a new paint program, Krita. It's open source, and almost the equivalent of the top-end programs, such as Corel Painter -- which I couldn't afford without wining State Lotto, if only because I'd have to update all my hardware before I could run them. However, Krita runs happily on my hardware, and the program itself is both vastly challenging and vastly rewarding. Am starting to do some very nice work in it, and this is still very, very early days. Got my big toe in the water. Next comes the foot, then the ankle... I have high hopes that in six months I'll be showing Krita art on line with good reason to be proud of it.