Lots of people pointed out I didn’t include the interview on my blog. Truth: my days of being ahead, or even running alongside, the technology curve are LONG over (I still refer to using iCloud as “hot synching”. Like when you rested your Palm Pilot in its little black cradle. Really.)
God please make this work.
Expect the Unexpected. That was the theme for Zip Code Stories, a flash fiction-style contest put on by WBUR and The Drum Literary Magazine.
I had no expectation that my submission would win. In fact, I thought the deadline had come and gone, and someone else had won. I had moved on.
Rewind: last month on vacation in Provincetown, after downing a few hot-pink gumball martinis, I submitted The Fells, where the character is confronted by an unexpected event, and changed.
So when I got an automated email saying The Fells had been accepted, I assumed the submission-tracking system had gone wild. Mercifully, human emails followed not long after. Taping my reading with Anthony Brooks two feet away was a trip. And Drum Editor Henriette Lazaridis Power is just plain cool.
Expect the unexpected. Maybe it’s working for me.
LITERARY IDOL goes like this: a trained actor reads aloud the first 250 words of your unpublished manuscript for a panel of four judges, high-powered agents all, with years of experience reading unsolicited manuscripts. When one judge hears a line that would make her stop reading, she raises her hand. The actor keeps reading until a second hand is raised.
The critiques were brilliant and spot-on. My manuscript was the last one read.
No, they weren’t there. Our judges were even bigger rockstars: Katharine Sands of Sarah Jayne Freymann; Jennifer Carlson of Dunow, Carlson & Lerner; Erin Harris of Irene Skolnik; and Rees Literary’s Ann Collette. Humble thanks for your kind words, esteemed panel!
Literary Idol ROCKED. I just wish I could have DVR’d it.
KIM SAVAGE 