This was my first year (of hopefully many more) attending Wicked Faire, a giant mash-up of what-have-you alt culture that revels in a staggering line-up of concerts, vendors, burlesque, live shows, costumes, more concerts, and all around mayhem. Exhilarating and exhausting at the same time. I am so glad I had off for Presidents Day to recouperate.
I’m not even going to try to detail all the different bands we stumbled into so instead just go here and browse around for a while. Acts that stood out in my mind: The Dark Clan, This Way to the Egress, and Psyche Corporation, who we hung out with after one of her performances and shoved cake in her face.
I also got a new waistcoat from Festooned Butterfly, who was in the hotel room three doors down from us and absolutely wonderful. I must have gone through their entire collection of size 34 waistcoats before settling on the first one I had picked up. They were all so spectacular.
Anyways, now I’m all detoxed and back to the old schedule (though this sudden snowfall is playing games with my weather senses). My zombie epic is making rather good progress, besides its ongoing lack of a good title, and I’m learning more about natural dyes of the ancient world than I ever thought possible. When I mysteriously get transported back to ancient Egypt and they demand verdigris dye I will totally be ready.
Well I suppose I can write about this now. My very first press moratorium! Take note, you might need that for Super Obscure Jeopardy one day.
I’ve been a disciple of Nathan Bransford’s blog for a while now and I urge anyone thinking about getting serious about authorship and all that icky publishing business to read it. It’s really indispensable I think. Anything you could want to know about writing a query, to questions of decorum with agents, to breaking down publication rights, is covered somewhere on his site. Additionally, he gives some nice rundowns on major happenings in the publishing world and holds all sorts of contests with his readers. One being the Stupendously Ultimate First Paragraph contest, which is pretty much what it sounds like.
Well, I’m not really one for Internet contests (they scare me) but I said hey, why not, and I stuck the first paragraph from Wolf and the Robots Who Ate the World in there. To my surprise, it ended up being one of the finalists. I might have done a little dance in my chair when I read that.
Remember that time when I actually wrote things and submitted them to magazines and journals instead of going on about Minecraft and the continued lack of snow in D.C.? Well then, new year, new times.
Back in 2009 (two years ago! I’m still dealing with this new year nonsense) I got my poem “ghostglass” published in Lines + Stars, a scrappy little literary magazine that began “as a means of establishing a new creative forum in Washington, D.C., a city that all-too-often coasts solely on its more mechanistic pursuits.” Hooray to that, I say! So I was elated to hear that they included me in their 2009-2010 Best Of collection. I was holding off until they announced it on their website (yes, this is the news I’ve been eluding to), but it doesn’t look like that will happen any time soon. And these copies are burning a hole in my e-news pocket. (Does that comparison work? Hmm.)
Anyways, I encourage you to pick up a copy or at the very least browse around the archives and read some quality writing. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some more plots to wrestle with.
soft hat talk, the king muffled with a brim held between our faces as if the polish out on the streets reads lips and counts them together, like one atom added between a string of others until what emerges is soft and silvery, crackling and kissed radioactive, with the secretive plans acid on the surface and the unspoken destruction locked within, the kind m […]
WHO ARE YOU ANYWAYS
Equal parts cyberpunk geek rogue, time-traveling zombie hunter, and mischievous poet. This is the chronicle of Daniel Wheatley's quest to live brilliantly, tell rather exciting stories, make awesome things, and find a cup of truly terrible coffee.
