Quills Conference 2023 comes to a close

 This Quills Conference was memorable for a couple of reasons. One, I'm no longer part of the executive committee. Every year or two, we cycle in a new President Elect, the old President Elect becomes President, and the President becomes Past President. I've been the Past President for two years, so I am now out to pasture for a bit before finding where I want to land in the local writing community. I gave a nice (and short) speech on focus, and that you find more of what you look for. So go looking for success, and do things successful authors do, and hang out with successful people.

Also memorable was winning two first place awards on the writing contests.

The first win was for my unpublished short story "Scrappers of the Great Starship" about a guy who makes a meager living scrounging scrap from an old starship that crashed generations earlier.

The second was a tie for first place for the Gold Quill in the Collections catergory of published works with The Best of the Planetary Anthology Series which can be found on Amazon. I've updated the cover to include the emblem for the award as shown here. I couldn't have done this one without the help of twenty-two awesome authors and several editors from the original series.

You can click the picture to go to Amazon to see it there. It comes in ebook and paperback. It's also on Kobo, Apple, and Nook. This was my first venture into wide ebook distribution with self-publishing, and it worked out pretty well.

Quills Conference

 I've had a week of recovery time now, so I figured I should report on how the League of Utah Writers Quills Conference went.

The coolest thing for me was to be awarded the first annual Emerald Typewriter award. The League added published short works to the writing contest this year, and I took top honors out of all the categories with my story Death by Misadventure, which appears in the anthology Unmasked: Tales of Risk and Revelation. (You can click on the book cover image)

Outside of that, I spent a lot of time either teaching classes or helping with the book signings of several of our special guests. I really enjoy teaching classes, giving back to the writing community that was so welcoming to me a few years back when I got serious about my writing.

In other news, my book Dicovery: Polecat Protocol Book One came out in both print and ebook, but I didn't have enough time to take a box of them with me to the Quills Conference.

Jericho Jackson looks forward to finishing one last job: a high-risk, high-pay mining gig on a tiny moon in a distant star system. A string of disasters throws the operation into life-threatening chaos as his team is cut off from outside contact. Even with their specialized training, if the power dies, his crew dies.

Shanna Percival, his teammate and one-time girlfriend, keeps their equipment in top shape, but her tendency to stick her nose where it doesn't belong turns up a mysterious cache of data that shouldn't exist.

Knowledge is power. Her discovery could be the ultimate key to overcoming the growing danger, but time is running out ...

If you've read it, I'd love to see a review. If you haven't, give it a look. I'm also looking for advance readers for books two and three coming out later this year, so drop me a line if you're interested in joining the team.

DragonComet 2017

I'm a finalist again this year for the upcoming 2017 DragonComet writing contest. The contest is run through LTUE each year in the spring.

They run the contest in three triads where they pick finalists from each triad, then toss them all into a big cage match at the end. Well, not quite. They have professional writers and artists judge the entries together to determine winners and runners up.

Once the winners are announced at the LTUE conference, they publish an anthology of all the winning entries and some runners up. Here's the one from last year where I was a runner up and my friend Jay won first place in the writing competition.

You can get the previous anthology here and here.

Beyond Words

I am participating in the Writing Contest: Writers Crushing Doubt, hosted by Positive Writer. Please follow the link to learn more.

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Hi. My name is John, and I am an introvert. (Everyone chime in with "Hi, John.")

It's like being eccentric in a way, since one of the cool things about being an introvert (or eccentric) is that you never consider it to be anything but normal. In the 7th grade I was voted the quietest kid in the school. I didn't know anybody, but apparently everyone knew me. I've known and enjoyed the life of a quiet introvert now for over half a century, yet introverts tend to form a small number of deep friendships rather than socializing widely. This was a handicap I didn't know I had.

I'd dabbled with writing fiction on and off for years. The sale of a story in 1995 was more fluke than skill. over the next eighteen years I collected quite a few false starts, and the occasional finished short story. My handful of submissions all garnered standardized form rejections. I was being crushed by doubt and had no idea how to improve.

It's not that I couldn't write. I'd written several chapters in popular books on software design. I just didn't know how to write fiction despite having read hundreds of books in the fantasy and science fiction genres over the years.

Then two things happened, with one triggering the other. First, one of my friends encouraged me to enter an anthology contest. That by itself would have resulted in several so-so attempts, and I would have figured I just wasn't fit to write fiction. It was the second thing which made all the difference.

As a result of my friend's invitation, I did some research and discovered the local writing community with all its quirky wonder. While my first attempts at writing were rejected as before, I was better at completing what I started. I also discovered a treasure trove of web resources on writing. Better even than those resources, I discovered within the local writing community a host of people ready to give me a hand, share encouragement, and let me join in as part of the community even though I was a neophyte.

Within months, I had turned the tables on my old failures and crushed my doubt. I won a position in an anthology, and got a view into the workings of a great editor who showed me what she was looking for in a story. Just this past week, two more anthologies were released with a story of mine in each, and I pitched a book I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2015 at a writer's symposium. The novel needs work still, but I know what it needs, and why it needs it.

Without that sense of community and belonging offered to me by local writers, none of that would have happened. I'm grateful for all my new friends, beyond words.

DragonComet short story contest

I'm sure anyone with a significant number of stories sold will likely read this and think, "noob." :) Veterans probably don't go "squee" when they receive a little bit of recognition. I just found that a story of mine has been selected as a finalist for the DragonComet short story contest, with final winners announced at next year's LTUE conference.

I doubt you've heard about this contest unless you're a regular attendee at LTUE, a writer-centric conference held each February in Provo, Utah. It's not a big name contest. My world won't likely change much based on being a finalist. The upside is that becoming a finalist (and possible winner) puts a new paving stone in the path.

I've read quite a bit recently about how short stories are a good way to break into writing. They give you contacts, references, and in general ease your way along in the market. Not to say it's ever easy; just that it can be less difficult.

This has proven true with me. In the past year and a bit I've attended a steampunk convention (twice), Salt Lake Comic Con, CONDuit, and LTUE, have had my short story "Revolutionary" published in the anthology Steel & Bone based on another writing contest, and have made a lot of new friends. Some of those friends and acquaintances are writers, editors, agents, small press publishers, or (like myself) have recently started to take writing more seriously.

So if you're wondering whether to jump in and start writing, or if you're wondering what to do with your writing, or better yet if you MUST write and you figure you might as well make something of it, there are lots of contests out there to get you started, and many are free to enter. Good luck to you as you plow through the learning curve, no matter where on that curve you are right now.