Hello everyone! I hope you all are having a lovely May. Sun shining, clear skies, daycare colds… daycare colds? Yes, we are on week three in my household of colds brought back home from daycare. It’s been rough.
But you know what’s been great? The anthology! Because it’s out! It’s finally available!
Mostly!
Okay, the ebook is available pretty much everywhere. I published wide through Draft2Digital. So, pick your preferred platform and grab your copy! It’s even available through Hoopla and Overdrive (Libby) so if you have a library card, you can get it there too! I believe in reading accessibility and availability, and I want to make sure everyone has a chance to read books they want to.
If you don’t see where you want it there, double check because it still might be there. I published it to all the ones I could!
I did say “Mostly” published above. What I mean is while the Ebook has been released, the paperback and audiobook editions aren’t quite ready. I do have pre-copies of the paperback I’ll be selling in my town on Saturdaw. However, wide distribution is running into some issues so it’s not set up yet. For the audiobook edition, honestly, it just takes a really long time to do! So I’m looking into hiring a secondary editor to help get through it sooner.
I feel like that’s it for tonight? I just wanted to provide a short and sweet update.
I actually wanted to write this yesterday. I had it planned so well — “Today I’m writing this while local authors come and read their parts of the anthology-” was how I was going to start it, and then I’d talk about how the audiobook is coming along.
I’m still going to talk about how the audiobook is coming along, I just don’t get to do so while I’m listening to the authors read their work. I think that’s a good thing, honestly. Being there while they read ended up being a different experience than I was expecting. Still very positive! But it was a bit more involved, and I found it easiest to follow along on my copy as they read. That way we were able to immediately tackle any incorrect phrasing or wording. I kind of made things a bit more fun, too!
I actually haven’t shared the recording setup, have I?
Alright, here’s a picture of me in the space from a few weeks back:
There’s a laptop just out of frame, and a bunch of soundproofing on the walls. I was able to find a place in town that allows podcast recording for members, and it was very easy to become a member! Plus the hosts of the studio have been extremely welcoming and accommodating. The room is a good size, too, and so yesterday when 3 of the other authors were there at the same time, we still had more than enough room.
Let’s talk about progress!
So, after the kickstarter funded at 150%, we have a lot more to do for the anthology BUT I’m very excited to do it all. February was all about polishing the anthology. We actually had our absolutely final submission come in on February 15th (and three pieces finalized then!) so I had more formatting to do again than I had planned for. That’s okay though! I also wanted to wait to complete the introduction and Acknowledgements until after the final piece was in.
On my first format of the anthology, I had the poems and stories follow the stages of grief and then morph into hope. I absolutely loved that order – but with the extra last minute submissions, the entire ordering was thrown off and I had to rethink how I wanted the anthology to come together. I wanted to make sure I paired off poems and stories in complimentary ways with each other. With a lot of work, I think I’ve succeeded!
I’ve ordered test copies of the anthology but they are still processing. I hope to have them quickly! I designed the covers for the hardback and paperback editions of the anthology, and I’m really quite happy with how they turned out.
February was all about formatting, and now March will be all about… okay, I can’t think of an M word that makes this make sense. Mail! March will be mailing out the bonuses to the backers. Also finishing recording the audiobook, as well as beginning to edit the recordings. We are about 50% recorded currently, but maybe 5% edited.
How about a date? I’m hesitant to give one — I feel like if I do, something is going to go wrong and push it back. But I’m tentatively, hopefully, optimistically saying all editions should be available by April 30th.
I’ll have a store page up soon – it was supposed to be up already, but I’m running into an error with ePub 3.0 processing. Just what we need, right? But once pre-orders are up, I’ll share the links everywhere!
That’s right, it is now less than twelve hours until the Kickstarter for Red Eyes and Tired Lungs is complete! At 9am PST February 1st, it closes, and the opportunity to get the Kickstarter Exclusive Hardcover edition will be gone forever…
So grab it here if you haven’t already:
My Keyboard is dying and so are my fingers (I had to do A LOT of typing today, let alone the entire week) so I’m going to keep this short and sweet and simple and leave you stuck with that song playing in your head, like it has mine since one of our authors in our anthology put it there.
(Side note, whenever that song pops into my head I think back to when I used to work at Futureshop a decade ago. If you don’t know what Futureshop was, it was Canadian Best Buy until it actually just became Best Buy because it was bought out. Anyways, if there were no customers in the store and it was almost closing time, the managers would sometimes blast that song or “It’s Closing Time”. Ah, the quintessential retail experience.)
I’m not sure why I did a side note actually, because I don’t have much more to add tonight! I’m excited, we are doing the audiobook edition – WE ARE DOING THE AUDIOBOOK EDITION AHHHH – so I need to get my voice back (lost it from a very rude cold) and get recording and editing and producing. This has been a huge project and while there is still lots to do before we are done, I can still say how great it feels to be doing it. I learned so many things from this experience. Most importantly, that I want to do it again! So in a couple short months I’ll be posting the theme for the next Call for Submissions over at winterjewelpublishing.ca. Go check it out if you haven’t, pick up the bonus word search there, and marvel at the emptiness (I don’t have much posted there yet.)
As always, thank you for reading this far, and I hope you have a great evening. And if you haven’t yet, go support the anthology!!
Yes, that was intentional. I hope you sang it in your head.
But it’s happened! We hit the halfway mark of the month, and we hit our first goal for our Kickstarter!
I’m absolutely elated by the generosity and support from everyone that has helped make this anthology — and the audiobook edition especially — a possibility. I can’t wait to release it fully into the world for everyone.
Now that we’ve made it this far, though, there are more goals ahead of us. Some of them are little goals, like the brand new one I added — Seed Paper Bookmarks! Don’t know what those are? Well, seed paper has seeds embedded in the paper. Once you are done using it, you plant the bookmark, and then it will eventually grow into wildflowers. Isn’t that beautiful?
If we hit $1250, I’ll be ordering Seed Paper Bookmarks as bonuses for the early print backer tiers.
What else?
If we hit $2000, I’ll be able to fully hire professional audiobook narrators for the anthology. $2250, and I’ll have chapter icons made! More? Well, I have my eyes set on some beautiful chapter art…
So please, if you haven’t checked out the anthology already, please do!
If you made it this far, I want to take a moment for a side story. In my last blog post, Chilly Thoughts and Hot Updates, I relayed the adventure of last Thursday where my previously pampered car did not make it to through the sub-artic temperatures. I had one concerned reader mention how surprised they were that no one stopped to help me!
I’m here to set the record straight and alleviate fears — I don’t live in some sort of everyone-for-themselves wasteland, and neighbours often help neighbours in dire straights. In my situation, I did make it to work, so my car was nicely parked in the parking lot, shivering imperceptibly so no one actually knew it was dying. Also, I didn’t actually ask anyone for help! My husband was able to get helpful suggestions from his coworkers, and to try and be concise I skipped the part where one of the coworkers tried to see if her truck had an outlet on it that my car could plug into (it didn’t, but she did check!). Either way, we made it.
Actually, I was much luckier than my Brother-in-Law and his Girlfriend that day. (Funny, my keyboard keeps wanting to type that as “Bother-in-law”, which also works(said humourously/with love) ). Their apartment had a fire alarm go off that same Thursday morning, and so they had to leave before even getting ready for the day, and sit huddling in their truck while the fire department scoped things out. Apparently people throughout the apartment were letting each other hop in each other’s warm cars, helping boost each other if their cars weren’t starting, all as they waited to be let back into the building. Unfortunately, they all got sent out at about 8am and weren’t allowed back in until noon. That’s a long time to sit shivering in a truck, so BIL and GF (GF-in-law?) went to BIL’s grandma’s house for a bit, only to have his truck die there. Seriously, it was COLD that day, vehicles were giving up all over the place. So then he called his dad and got a ride back to their apartment to grab GF’s car and survive the rest of the day.
The other theme to this I guess is have a big family that you can drop by people’s houses and call up for help. I’m definitely glad I married into such a helpful, big family. Always someone you can ask!
However, I was also pointing out that the neighbours in the apartment were helping each other keep warm on the coldest morning we’ve had this year (so far). Just as an exhibit A!
Another example I can give —
As well as living somewhere where it gets so cold your face can fall off, I also live somewhere you can get buried in snow. Even tonight we are supposed to get 20cm, or 8inches, of snow. Just overnight. Last year we had a total of 190cm over the winter, or 74 inches, which is more snow than I am tall. By quite a few inches. (I’m about 62 inches tall, apparently.)
Last year I actually built a parapet with all the snow we got in the front yard. I could stand up there — probably eight feet up, thanks to the snowplows using our front lawn as the dumping ground for the road snow — and see streets away. And all my neighbours could probably see me too, and were probably wondering what the heck I was doing up there.
Anyways, all that backstory is actually about another year, maybe four or six years back. It had snowed at least a foot or two overnight and at the time we lived in a townhouse and I had a little car that liked to surf the snow like a boat. So I was up very early for work that day, get into my car, hit the gas and get out of the parking lot with relatively no issues before most of the rest of the lot are even up. Unfortunately, just about every single other person in the parking lot discovered they were stuck when they woke up and were about to head off to work. Including my husband.
And then they all worked together, digging each other out, pushing cars, throwing mats underneath tires, etc. Honestly, by what I had relayed to me by my spouse after the fact, it was an absolute hoot. Everyone stuck helped each other get out of that parking lot, and got to actually meet some of their neighbours out of it.
I won’t recount the number of times my car, or my husbands, has been stuck somewhere and we’ve had a passerby try and help us. Actually, just in early spring/late winter last year we had a bunch of snow and I got stuck backing out of my driveway, and then our neighbour across the street ran over to help when he saw us struggling.
So yeah, I guess that’s it. This became way longer than I meant it to. But I just wanted to promise all concerned readers that I absolutely do live somewhere that people help each other out… especially if it’s winter and you are stuck.
It is currently a balmy -21C here, which is almost tropical compared to the -37C with wind chill we had just a couple days ago. It was so cold that my car, like many others, refused to start. See, my car is from Vancouver, and it thinks that it belongs in a garage — something that I don’t actually have. So when the days dip this cold, it decides that it would much rather just stay home.
It doesn’t help that I don’t have a block heater. You’ll have one of two responses to that: either “Oh no! Can’t you get one?” or “What in the world is a block heater?” I’d love to tell you, but I’m not a car mechanic. All I know is it’s a cord that sticks out of the front of your car that you plug in and it helps your car stay alive in the dreadful cold, and is absolutely crucial when you live somewhere like Northern BC. I think it as something to do with the battery and with keeping a block heated. Very important.
Why don’t I have one? Apparently my car can’t get one. Again, it was made to live in Vancouver and not this chilly arctic environment. I believe I even asked the dealership when I bought it to drive it home, “Does it have a block heater?” because my old cars didn’t either (although they faired much better in the cold weather) and I wanted to have one this time. The dealership said “Yeah, definitely,” and none of us bothered to check under the hood.
Instead, I had to get something called an oil pan heater. An oil pan heater is similar to a block heater, in the sense that it is a cord that sticks out of the front of your car that you plug in. The difference is that it heats up your oil pan instead, and you have to literally just glue it to the oil pan and hope it stays snug on there forever after. Also, you can only leave it plugged in for a maximum of four hours, but you need to leave it plugged in long enough that it actually heats up your oil pan.
What does this mean? Well, on days I have to drive into work and be there at 8am, I need to brave the sub-artic temperatures at as early as 5:30am and plug my car in and hope the two hours of warming my oil pan is enough to help my little, delicate car survive the frosty temperatures.
Spoiler alert: it was not. I was able to get to work on Thursday, but when I went out at 11:30am to start my car again to warm the engine, it had already given up. My car refused to exist in this temperature.
When followed was quite the adventure to get it working again… for my husband. He was kind enough to ask his extensive family if any of them had a portable battery we could plug my car into, and when they didn’t, he went and bought one. However, travesty prevailed — the portable battery he bought was a dud. Back and forth he went all day, trying out different things to get the car to move and then retreating inside to warm up again. When it’s that cold — that was our -37C with wind chill day — you can only be outside for a few minutes at a time before risking frostbite.
Long story short eventually he was able to boost my car with a different portable battery borrowed from another department at work. We swapped cars, he drove my car home, and there my car has remained, shivering in the driveway.
Except, we can’t just leave it there and hope for the best. If I don’t motivate it to exist once more, the battery will completely die and I’ll have to get a new one. I’ve had it happen before where after a week straight of -25 to -40C, my car battery just completely refused to ever come alive again, despite our attempts at shocking it alive again and again like Frankenstein’s monster.
One thing I’ve learned in this chilly weather is that…
My husband has the warmest jacket. No, seriously. He has a Carhartt that he bought probably 14 years ago and it doesn’t look like much, not even that thick, and yet it can withstand this freeze like it’s nothing. Seriously. When I have to dash outside in the mornings I just borrow that jacket because I know I won’t even feel the cold. All that standing outside trying to get my car working? Only his cheeks were cold, the jacket kept the rest of him quite reasonably warm.
His cheeks were extremely red though.
This is the time of year where it would be smart to wear balaclavas. If you aren’t Canadian, you probably know them as ski-masks, or robber masks. Neither my husband and I can wear them/bother to wear them though, since they usually are uncomfortable to wear with glasses, and our glasses get very foggy. Also, the number one way to stay fine in the cold is to not spend much time out there, which is what we tend to do.
Later today I’ll be taking my toddler skating again for I think her sixth time. Every Sunday we try and take her skating. She turned two in September, so she’s exactly as good at skating as you could possibly expect a toddler to be, but it’s been tons of fun to teach her. We make a game of it: we push her for 3/4 of a lap on a chair, then for 1/4 of a lap she has to skate to me with my husband right behind her to catch her. Last week I was able to try my first new ice skates in about 15 years since my in-laws bought me new ones for Christmas! They are so pretty, and I’m sure I’ll get years more use out of them.
Apparently I have to hurry up and write – we need to get our skates sharpened before we go today, and since my toddler just woke up from her nap, that means we will be going soon. So, onto…
The Hardcover edition of the anthology will ONLY be available during the Kickstarter/from the Kickstarter, so if you want one, pick it up soon!
I’ve made a few stretch goals for the anthology that I’d love to hit. The first is the use of professional narrators! If we hit our first goal of $1000, I’ll be doing most of the narration for the anthology, as well as a few of the contributing authors. However, if we hit $2000, I’ll be hiring professional narrators for most of the anthology to give our readers the best audiobook experience we can possibly give them!
On a related note – anyone know of a podcast/recording studio I can use/rent in Prince George? While I do have a great microphone, I don’t have the professional setup that I want to have to give the best narration quality I can possibly achieve. I’ve done voicework for professional projects before, but I want to make sure I can do the absolute best.
What other updates?
I’ve made another website! Winterjewelpublishing.ca is the new place. I’m still keeping this blog, but this one will stay my personal/author blog, while WJP will be more for big projects and publishing, like the anthology. In fact, I already have the next anthology planned, so if you want to have a reminder once I put the theme out, go and check it out! I’m expecting to post the next theme announcement in April.
I’ve also joined Threads. I’m still getting the ropes there, but if you use Threads, feel free to say hi! I’m about 90% sure my username is asha_jade_goodwin on it.
I feel like there was at least one other update, but I’m absolutely blanking on it right now. Whatever it is, it will come back to me I’m sure, hopefully in time for my next post!
Oh, there is the Kickstarter Freebie. As a thank you to everyone who has backed the kickstarter so far, I released a free crossword for the anthology on winterjewelpublishing.ca so go grab it!
I’m planning on launching it January 1st, so make sure to click the “Notify me on launch” button. This Kickstarter will be to fund the audiobook edition of the anthology, so you can also listen to all the amazing stories and poems!
This anthology has 17 contributors, with a total of 16 poems and 12 stories (fiction and non-fiction). I should add a caveat of “so far” since there is a few more writers I am working with to get their work ready for inclusion.
What sort of stories and poems will you find in this anthology?
There is…
… a poem grappling with waiting for news after an evacuation… … a story about the beast that haunts during the summer season… … a poem about trying to find the bright side in a smoky summer… … a story about a loveable dog dealing with an evacuation… … a poem about the anatomy of a wildfire… … a story about a break-up as wildfires get closer… … a poem about the potential future of Vancouver… … a story about a dryad who tries to locate the source of a wildfire… … an acrostic-type poem that lists all the types of vegetation and habitats lost in wildfires… … a story about a little boy who converses with flames… … a good-bye to the color red, to the fires, until they come again…
And many more! If you want to read these, well, check back soon!
I’m actually so incredibly excited about where this is at, how it’s going, and where we are heading. It’s been amazing working with so many talented writers as they share their heartfelt works. I’ve been able to learn and try so many new things with this project, trying on all sorts of hats as this anthology comes together. I can’t wait until I can finally hold it in my hands.
So, that’s why I’ve been so radio-silent and terrible at updating this. I’ve been very busy, I swear! That’s not even to talk about what I’ve got going on in my non-author life. But I’ve been working hard to get all this together and have it look as beautiful as I am able to make it.
I always mean to post more often than I do, but that’s life.
First off, the anthology! If you don’t know what that is, click here! If you want to submit, absolutely do so. I still have room for submissions and want a wide variety of voices! The only limitation is Canadian writers.
I am currently working on edits for all of the so-far accepted pieces. All the flash and short fiction edits have been sent out, and I am currently working on any edits for the poetry. Keep an eye on your email!
I’ve really been enjoying the editing process. It’s one thing to edit your own work, another to do a beta swap, and something else entirely to edit so many different stories! It’s great practice and really teaching me how to edit but preserve tone/narrator’s voice.
I’ve also been working hard preparing for Nanowrimo! Or rather, preparing other people for Nanowrimo. I should have been sharing my weekly prep talks here too. My own work for Nanowrimo is a little bit iffy – I’ve changed my mind a couple times. First I wanted to do a paranormal thriller. Then I swapped to wanting to continue writing in the Aspects universe with a novella trilogy. I did a lot of plotting in that, but some weird glitch in Plottr deleted 3 weeks of plotting, which halted me in my tracks. Then, thanks to a comment one of my teachers made, I came up with the idea of maybe making a collection for the short stories I wrote this year, with chapters after each that discusses my motivations for writing each story. That will probably be what I write for November… however, this morning I started having more ideas for the Aspects novellas again. Woops!
There’s another thing I’ve been working on – school! After over a decade I’ve decided to go back to school and I’m taking three classes this semester. Add that onto working full time and parenting and my weeks are always exceptionally busy. But I love staying busy, and I’m so happy to be taking these courses. They are illuminating in ways that I need.
I have more I want to write about, but maybe I’ll save that for the next one.
It’s been a little while, so it’s time for some updates!
First up, the anthology!
I’m extending the deadline until September 30th, or whenever we hit our reading cap! So if you’ve been stressed about not getting your story done in time, you now have a little longer to write it. I really want to see what everyone can come up with, so please submit!
I will start reading and sending out approvals after this Friday, so keep an eye on your inbox.
What other updates do I have?
Well, I updated a cover for a novelette I published a few years ago! I’m glad to finally get it more in line with the genre expectations. Here’s what it looks like:
I’m working out a plot for a novella trilogy set in the same world, set slightly after the events of “Aspects of Me.” More details for that series will probably come out in or just before November, so stay tuned!
I think that’s all for this update. Happy writing!
This is two-for-one post, but the first one is short and sweet.
So for my anthology, I’ve been trying to get eyes and ears on it wherever I can. That includes putting up posters all around my town, including my work. Have you seen the posters? I have to say, they are quite nice. At least I think so.
Anyways, I was working from home today when I got a message from my coworker. She had just been on lunch and seen an interesting poster in our lunchroom. “Hey! I think you might be interested in this, it sounded right up your alley! It was called Red eyes and tired lungs and it was for BC writers!”
Which made me laugh, and if you’ve seen the meme of Obi-Wan Kenobi going “Of course I know him, he’s me,” then that is how that played out. It’s adorable how supportive she is but also how she had no idea about this, despite us working close together and I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this anthology right in front of her to another coworker. Okay, she doesn’t write, so maybe she just tuned out the conversation, but it’s hilarious either way.
And the best part is, clearly the poster did something right because it caught her eye!
If you’d like to know more about the anthology, feel free to go and take a look at it here:
This one isn’t short and sweet, though. In fact, it’s a little bit sad. Mild/broad content warning coming up, that I will be discussing foster care and (my) experiences around it. It might be a little sad. Or It might be a little funny, in a somewhat dark way. If this sort of content isn’t for you, feel free to skip it for next week, which should be on a happier topic.
On to the post!
Have you ever had a realization that re-contextualizes a childhood memory?
With the release of the Barbie movie (which should be a whole separate post of its own which I won’t be doing today) I’ve come across many people talking about how they used to play with Barbie’s as kids, and how they played with them. Of course, being a person who existed and grew up in a time and place where barbies were popular, I of course played with them as well.
The first conversation I was pulled into about the nostalgia of playing with Barbie’s, I remarked that the first thing I remembered about my Barbie days is how they were fraught with danger – namely, my sister, who would pull the heads off the dolls. Seriously, I had to carefully hoard them to keep them safe. So my first memory is not being very interested in Barbie’s due to the riskiness of owning them, getting attached, and then finding them destroyed. I’d try to press the heads back on but they would never quite fit the same way again. Luckily we rarely got new ones, or perhaps our parents stopped after that kept happening, because I do somewhat remember restocking our Barbie supply with some of those grab-bags from Value Village. But they were never my favourite toy to play with, perhaps because of their destructibility.
The second time I came across this conversation being played out, I remembered how I actually played with Barbie’s.
See, my favourite doll toys weren’t Barbie’s. They were actually Polly Pockets.
I actually mentioned this offhand in the first conversation, but I remembered more about how I played with them in the second conversation.
Why did I prefer Polly Pockets over Barbie’s? There were a few reasons. One, I think they were less-destructible than the Barbie’s. Perhaps, because of their size, they were also easier to hide and keep safe. Also, I think I saw myself in them a little bit. They were so much shorter than all the other dolls, just like me. Because I was a very small kid, and I think the long-legged tall Barbie’s maybe weren’t as relatable as the short little Polly pockets to me.
This is all conjecture-I can’t really dive into the thoughts I had as 5 to 8 year old me, only remember the actions. Who knows why I actually preferred them, but that is my guess.
But I didn’t play with the Polly Pockets by themselves. I did use and play with the Barbies too, in conjunction with the rest.
I had a specific game I would play with them, actually.
The Barbie’s would kidnap the Polly pockets, take them from their homes, and force them into being babies and reliant on the Barbie’s. The Polly pockets were supposed to act like babies and different than they were used to. They weren’t allowed talking with the other Polly’s about their experiences before they became babies for the barbies, and if they were caught, they would get in lots of trouble. They were supposed to just forget their old lives and be the perfect little babies the Barbie’s wanted them to be, swaddled with blankets and not allowed to talk. There was a lot of confusion for the Polly’s, where they wanted to escape but they didn’t know how to. And they also felt bad because the Barbie’s usually treated them well, if they weren’t being bad, and what if they had nowhere to go if they ran away?
Foster care. I was re-enacting my experience of being a foster child and going into foster care.
Honestly, I kind of chuckled when I came to that realization. But I chuckled in a resigned way, as someone who is slowly peeling apart the trauma of their earlier years to discover the person they want to be.
I went into foster care at about two and a half years old, and so while I may not have remembered those initial days, at five years old I was still going on visits with my birth family and I was always very aware of what I was and why I was in foster care. And I do have lots of memories of visits in those early years. But somewhere in my brain there was a seed of the confusion and difficulties I experienced adjusting to a different life than the one I had previously.
I don’t know at what age I stopped going, but I do know I was in play-therapy for the first couple years I was in foster care due to some of what I witnessed as a child. I wonder if my playing with my toys as I was doing was an attempt to replicate those techniques I must have learned in play-therapy. However with no adult to guide me through those difficult feelings and no way to voice what was clearly tumultuous inside of me, I was never able to complete the story, never able to make myself feel better about those Polly’s that were separated from their homes and lives.
Well, that’s kind of it for the story. There isn’t really a resolution, just that realization. I eventually stopped playing with those toys-I think they got lost in a move-but I can see those themes continued to reflect and refract in imagination games I would play as I got older. I just had a really sad realization when I wrote this post (edit: the morning of, because I actually wrote it last week) , and I am working through it the only way I know how to-writing it out, blabbing about it, holding the memory in my hand and tilting it left and right in an attempt to extract a little more information from it. I’m definitely a little surprised it even took me this long to realize, but I never bothered to be introspective about my early childhood play before, at least not that early. Maybe there is more I’ll have to dive into to understand a little more about myself.
I think that’s it to say about this story. I have a lot more I could add about my time in foster care and my experiences and how it may have further influenced the ways I played, but I am still ruminating on this revelation. It’s a little hard for me because I do not have someone I can ask about my early experiences. My one big question is why the Polly’s specifically became babies again. Was I infantilized in a way I was uncomfortable with when I joined my first foster family, or my second?
Oh wait, I do have a vague recollection about sometimes the Barbie’s would trade the Polly’s if they were acting up… If this was in a movie where a little kid plays while the child psychologist watches and remarks on it, I’d probably find it a little unbelievable and perhaps a little too on the nose. Maybe a bit predictable. But I guess it isn’t, because it is exactly what happened.
I think that’s all I need to write about this time. Kind of a weird one, I know. Definitely a break from my normal writing related posts, but the nice thing about this is that this is my blog and I can write whatever the heck I want from here. And if you have read any of my previous posts, you know my tendency to ramble on and talk in vain about totally in unrelated stuff, so I feel pretty proud of myself that I actually happen to go and stay pretty on track this entire.
If you got to the end of this post, thank you for joining me and reading it. I’m glad I can have this little corner of the internet where I can natter, and potentially yell into the void. Getting it out can be cathartic, in whatever format I can.
If you are wondering what else I’m doing in my life, it’s mostly just continuing to write novels. If you haven’t checked it out already, make sure you go and visit the anthology linked on the home page of the website (edit: or further up this post) because I definitely want have more people participating in it so it can be an awesome anthology with a lot of stories from a lot of different people.
Actually I do not have the brainpower to type a whole post in song tonight. Or any night, probably. But what is this about anthologies?
Actually, it’s really hard to decide which one to mention first. Eenie, meenie, minie-
Here’s the anthology that I was published in! My short story is “Bearers of a Barren World” and my pen name on the book is Asha Jade Goodwin. I have to say, I am so incredibly excited and proud to have been accepted for this anthology. I can’t wait to read the rest of the anthology once I get my copy. It’s actually really hard for me to articulate all of my thoughts – just know that I’ve told literally everyone in my life about this. It just feels so good to have another story out there in the world.
And another anthology!
If you missed it, PLEASE PLEASE check out this post from last week:
That’s right – after getting exactly one (1) of my own stories accepted into an anthology, I’ve set out to make my own. To be faiiiir, I had the idea to make an anthology with writers from my region long before I ever got published. On the other hand, it never would have been able to happen until now for a variety of reasons.
I talked briefly about how the idea finally came to me and it felt like a proper unifying theme in the last post, so I’ll skip that part.
What I want to talk about instead is what else caused it. A few years ago, when I got the first inklings of a concept to have an anthology with BC writers, I knew nothing really about any of this process. I barely knew editing other than constantly re-writing my work and then shoving it in a drawer to forget about it. I didn’t know squat about publishing. I still don’t, not really, but what I’ve gained is community.
Community comes in many forms, and for me, a lot of it is online, as well as some in person. From various discord groups I’ve collected a few friends over the years and a few helpful groups of people, and with NaNoWriMo and MLing I’ve been able to pull together people for meet-ups. As we gently (or sometimes forcefully) nudge each other along to our various goals, we share and swap and gain a little more insight into the process among us all.
With the help of other writers who often have had much more success/knowledge than I, I’m hoping we will be able to make this anthology a success. From writers who share the post around and then submit to it; from communities that know all the ins and outs of publishing and help guide others in the process; to people who help squint at legalese and compile data; to beta readers and editors that review the work and improve it; to friends who help match payments and increase the amounts we can pay towards our writers. All of those groups are coming and working together to make this little cinder of an idea grow stronger.
I actually have another post that follows the theme “Community” brewing that hopefully I’ll share next week, and… oh dear… I think I’m coming up with the idea for next years anthology as well.
One thing at a time. Submit to me your stories, let’s make this a success so we can do it all again next year.
Asha Jade Goodwin 