'Nathan Burgoine's Blog, page 96
August 4, 2017
Romancing the Capital – Where I’ll Be!
10:00 am – Heroes that Growl…and Bite! – Kanata A Room – Milly Taiden, Eliza Gayle, Heather Long, and myself chat about the heroes who have teeth, or fur, or both.
11:00 am – Exploring LGBTQ Romance – Kanata C Room – Elizabeth Lister, Angela S. Stone, Kristine Cayne, Sheri Lyn and I will chat about rainbow romance.
1:00 pm – Blurbs Against Humanity – Algonquin Room – Bring some laughter, a cheeky sense of humour, and a willingness to win a prize or two, and come play with romance book blurbs from participating authors of RtC, and get one author’s chocolate into another author’s peanut butter. Elizabeth Lister is helping me MC my little game.
Saturday, August 5th, 2017
2:00 pm – The Bookfair! This is open to the public. You can meet all the authors, even if you didn’t register for the event, and walk on in to get your books signed. I’ll be at the table with the big rainbow flag.
August 3, 2017
Romancing the Capital – August 3rd-5th – Where I’ll Be!
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Hey everyone! I’m off today to Romancing the Capital. If you’re also coming to the awesome romance conference here in Ottawa, here’s where I’ll be over the next three days:
Thursday, August 3rd, 2017 (today!)
4:00 pm – Indie, Publisher, and Hybrid – What’s the Best Choice? – Kanata B Room – A discussion with Milly Taiden, Deb Cooke, Elle Rush and myself, about the options of publishing and the different paths to get
your book out there.
7:00 pm – Discover a New Author – Kanata A Room – I’m taking part in a multi-author reading, where I’ll be reading from In Memoriam.
Friday, August 4th, 2017
10:00 am – Heroes that Growl…and Bite! – Kanata A Room – Milly Taiden, Eliza Gayle, Heather Long, and myself chat about the heroes who have teeth, or fur, or both.
11:00 am – Exploring LGBTQ Romance – Kanata C Room – Elizabeth Lister, Angela S. Stone, Kristine Cayne, Sheri Lyn and I will chat about rainbow romance.
1:00 pm – Blurbs Against Humanity – Algonquin Room – Bring some laughter, a cheeky sense of humour, and a willingness to win a prize or two, and come play with romance book blurbs from participating authors of RtC, and get one author’s chocolate into another author’s peanut butter. Elizabeth Lister is helping me MC my little game.
Saturday, August 5th, 2017
2:00 pm – The Bookfair! This is open to the public. You can meet all the authors, even if you didn’t register for the event, and walk on in to get your books signed. I’ll be at the table with the big rainbow flag.
Matches 4 – I Saw the Sign
Not creepy at all.
Today’s series of writing prompts all come from various signs I’ve seen. Sometimes it’s a combination that made me shiver (see photo, right), other times it’s a chuckle. Either way, inspiration can be right there at the side of the street.
If this is your first visit to my prompts (or ‘matches’) it’s in honour of a book called The Writer’s Book of Matches. It has 1,001 little prompts that are designed to give you something to work with. I often flip through it when I’m in the mood to just write without a specific focus. The book has three kinds of prompts: A single line of dialog; a scenario or situation; and assignment prompts where the book lists a series of three characters all reacting to a particular moment/event, and since I first got it, I’ve been noting my own prompts to myself the same way.
If you ever find success or just fiddle around with any of these ‘matches,’ please do let me know!
A couple pass by a pair of signs that say “Dead End,” and “Watch for Children.” Looking back, they realize that was their first mistake.
“It says ‘No Tresspassing,’ but I guess we’re ignoring that, eh?”
After parents advocate changing the bylaws “for the safety of children,” a dog owner is frustrated when every park she used to take her dog to now has signs demanding all dogs must remain on their leashes. She concocts a plan to replace the signs with ones suggesting all children should be on leashes to protect dogs from the children. She doesn’t expect her prank to go viral, or to unleash a storm of counter-protests and divide the neighbourhood.
Backstage without a pass, a fan at a concert dodges security by slipping through a door marked “Employees Only” and comes face-to-face with the lead singer he idolizes…having a tryst with someone they shouldn’t.
Two days after the funerals of his mother and sister, who died at the wheel of a drunk driver, a construction worker holding the “Slow”/”Stop” sign on a blind corner realizes that the car approaching is driven by the judge who let the “local golden boy” off with a warning so as not to ruin “his bright future.” Write about the following three characters: The construction worker, who has a brief moment to decide whether or not to flip his sign the wrong way and potentially get revenge; The judge, who’s married to someone with a serious drinking problem and knows he has no ability to distance himself from the topic; the innocent driver of the truck coming in the other direction, who has no idea of his role in what amounts to murder at the hands of a construction sign.
See you next week, and by all means, drop any prompts of your own in the comments!
August 2, 2017
Writing Wednesday – Romancing the Capital!
Thanks to Camp NaNoWriMo, I’m very on track for my writing these days. This is good, because I’m about to enter three days of romantic hilarity at Romancing the Capital.
If you don’t know it, RtC is a romance conference here in Ottawa, where yours truly and almost fifty other authors will be chatting, gaming, entertaining, teaching, and reading for the next three days. It’s a blast, and even if you can’t make it to the conference (it’s sold out), there is an opportunity to come to the open-to-the-public-bookfair that happens on Saturday.
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Exit Plans for Teenage Freaks
Still truckin’ along on the novel, and as I mentioned above, thanks to Camp NaNoWriMo I got a huge amount of words down this month.
Of Echoes Born
Ditto; which is to say, things are good word-count wise and I feel like I’m going to be just fine to recover from my month of renovation noise induced word count slippage.
Open Calls for Submission
Every Wednesday I try to include my list off all the various open calls for submission I’ve found and/or am trying to write for. If you know of any others, by all means do drop them in the comments and I’ll add them to the list. If this is helpful for people other than myself, it’s even better.
August to date: nada, yet.
Previously this year thus far: January was: 6 submissions (4 reprints, 2 new), 1 acceptance; in February was bare minimum: 1 submission (1 new); March brought 1 rejection, and 1 submission (new); April say 1 submission (new) and 1 acceptance; May: 1 submission (new), 1 acceptance. June: BUZZ! (Let’s not talk about that). July: 1 submission (1 new).
Chicken Soup for the Soul – Various titles, various themes, various deadlines, 1,200 word count limit.
Clarkesworld – Currently open for art, non-fiction, and short story submissions.
Cast of Wonders – Young adult short fiction market, open to story submissions up to 6,000 words.
Totally Entwined – Many calls, various dates and lengths.
Erotic Short Romances — Carina Press, an ongoing call for 10k to 17k word count limit.
Haunted — Erotic stories centered around the theme of haunted, Mugwump Publishing; Deadline August 5th, 2017; 1k-5k word count limit.
Flint Charity Anthologies – Organized by Vicktor Alexander; deadlines throughout September, 2017; 5k to 20k word count limit.
Saints & Sinners Short Fiction Contest — Judged by Radclyffe; deadline October 3rd, 2017; 3k to 7k word count limit.
Futurescape Contest – “Blue Sky Cities” theme; 8k word count limit; deadline October 13th, 2017.
July 31, 2017
Sacred Band – Joseph D. Carriker, Jr. (Lethe Press)
I’m over at Out in Print today, talking about a really enjoyable queer superhero story.
Out in Print: Queer Book Reviews
It’s possible anyone who’s met me for more than, say, a few hours will hear me wax poetic about the X-Men of my youth. When I was a kid, they were a much needed allegory to my own existence. Think about it: the mutants were people born different, but to normal families, and hated and feared for their difference by the world around them.
This isn’t hard to translate for a queer kid, especially one who knows things weren’t going to go well if anyone found out.
The difference, of course, is that the X-Men also had fantastic powers, which they used to try and prove to the world they weren’t a threat, and smacked down villainy wherever they found it—especially among their own kind.
So, years later, when here and there the various comic books did finally deliver a few queer characters, I was so…
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July 27, 2017
Matches 3 – Turning a Phrase
I often talk about how I “dream in short story.” It’s a quirk of my brain that many nights, when I dream, I’m not involved at all. I watch from above as a story plays out (often with a pretty cohesive narrative, which is nice). I do dream where I’m included sometimes, but far more often it’s like I’m watching a movie instead. Today’s writing prompt matches come from two dreams where in the midst of dreaming, a character paused and made a clever turn of phrase that my waking brain remembered hours later.
[image error]If this is your first visit to my prompts (or ‘matches’) it’s in honour of a book called The Writer’s Book of Matches. It has 1,001 little prompts that are designed to give you something to work with. I often flip through it when I’m in the mood to just write without a specific focus. The book has three kinds of prompts: A single line of dialog; a scenario or situation; and assignment prompts where the book lists a series of three characters all reacting to a particular moment/event, and since I first got it, I’ve been noting my own prompts to myself the same way.
If you ever find success or just fiddle around with any of these ‘matches,’ please do let me know!
“Stealing kisses” becomes literal when a young boy realizes he has the ability to remove all memory of a kiss—and any love that came thereafter—from adults with a single touch.
“I know the devil’s in the details, but I never thought it would be literal.”
A man faced with a difficult decision over two potentially lucrative career decisions sleeps on it. When he wakes up, he discovers he can live “the best of both worlds” when he starts to slide effortlessly between a reality where he made the first choice, and another where he made the second.
Two strangers living in different cities who have never met start to “see eye to eye,” catching glimpses from the point of view of the other randomly throughout their day, with increasing frequency.
When a teen discovers an ability to skip forward in time by a month and meet with their future self for an hour, they concoct a plan to reinvent “paying it forward.” The future version hands over cash and information to the past version, which goes back and invests or saves it, accordingly. Soon, the teen is on the edge of being very, very wealthy. Write about the following three characters: The time-skipping teen in the future, who is wondering if they just vanish once their counterpart from the past goes back, or if the world will change around them; a fraud investigator, who has noticed odd duplications of certain serial numbers in a particular bank, but can’t otherwise seem to prove either bill a fake; a journalist following the story of the teen’s sudden fortune, who sees the teen meeting with themself.
See you next week, and by all means, drop any prompts of your own in the comments!
July 20, 2017
Matches 2 – It’s the End of the World As We Know It
[image error]It’s been a week, and I’ve been batting the idea back and forth with fellow author Jeffrey Ricker about these writing prompts potentially ending up collected somewhere. In the meanwhile, here are five more from my various notes/thoughts/journals/dreams.
If this is your first visit to my prompts (or ‘matches’) it’s in honour of a book called The Writer’s Book of Matches. It has 1,001 little prompts that are designed to give you something to work with. I often flip through it when I’m in the mood to just write without a specific focus. The book has three kinds of prompts: A single line of dialog; a scenario or situation; and assignment prompts where the book lists a series of three characters all reacting to a particular moment/event, and since I first got it, I’ve been noting my own prompts to myself the same way.
This weeks matches all come as fallout from various dreams and mostly due to my husband playing Fallout or The Last of Us. I often dream about the things I’m listening to, reading, or watching before I go to bed—one of the reasons I avoid horror—and my husband’s video gaming inspires a lot of subconscious thought.
If you ever find success or just fiddle around with any of these ‘matches,’ please do let me know!
Yellowstone erupts.
“Oh my God! Look at what happened to the moon!”
With only about twelve hours warning, people prepare for a Coronal Mass Ejection that will take down massive swaths of the power grid, as well as knocking GPS and most lines of communication offline. It will arrive sometime overnight.
“Look, we don’t have much time. You need to get to somewhere safe, before it all goes to hell. I’ll meet you at the cabin. I don’t know how long it will take me to get to you, but don’t leave, okay? We’ll never find each other again in this mess.”
A biological outbreak devastates the population in the days leading up to Christmas, with a nearly complete rate of fatality. In one city, this coincides with a terrible ice storm. Write about the following three survivors who find themselves completely alone: A grade school teacher, who fell ill with the outbreak and thought he would die but wakes up in the hospital, the only survivor in the building; a truck driver who just made it to the city before the ice storm hit; and first year university student on his way home to his family for the holidays who was at the airport when all planes were grounded and doesn’t know anyone in the city at all.
See you next week, and by all means, drop any prompts of your own in the comments!
July 19, 2017
Writing Wednesday – Submit!
Thanks to the Flash Fiction Challenge, from NYCMidnight, I feel so much better this week about the state of the ‘Nathan. Last time, I made it to honourable mention in the first round of the earlier contest, which… wasn’t far, but like I said last week, it’s a challenge and it makes me stretch, so I put on my big person pants and signed up for another go.
And I loved it. At first, I was nervous: I got “fairy tale,” “a ticket stub,” and “an abandoned railroad car.” I started with the genre, pondering and thinking about what made a fairy tale, which fairy tales I liked, and then had my “click” moment when I remembered Pinocchio and the idea of Toyland.
So, for the contest, I ended up submitting “Pine Puppet & Candlewick,” which was a queer retelling of part of the story of Pinocchio. I have no idea if I’ve shot myself in the foot by telling a queer story, but either way, I really liked what I came up with, and frankly, if it doesn’t make it through the process, I can flush it out from the 1,000 word limit and I think I could find a new home for it.
Exit Plans for Teenage Freaks
More success here. I’ve still got quite a bit ahead of me, but I’m happy with where I’ve set down Cole with his family, with Malik (I wrote the scene where Malik admits to Cole he’s maybe bi, and it flowed well) and I’m soon getting into the very meat of the chase/run/capture/escape stuff, which will be a complete shift in pacing and tone. I’m also really enjoying writing scenes with Cole seeing his parents interact: they’re a loving, supportive couple, which of course is that awful mix of embarrassing and awesome to a teen.
Dad tapped his lips, and my mother leaned in for a kiss. They smiled at each other, and I stared down at the rice steamer because when they looked at each other like that I could never decide if it was the most awesome thing in the world, or if it was really, really gross.
Once they were done being gross awesome parents in love, my dad leaned over and checked the timer.
Five minutes, he signed.
I’ll set the table. My mom almost never spoke when she signed. Then again, she wasn’t planning to be an interpreter like I was. Watching them move around each other while she gathered cutlery and paper napkins was like watching a kind of dance. They touched each other in passing, little touches that weren’t necessary, but made my mom smile and my dad wink. It was adorable.
And gross.
Really, it was a wonder I’d ever made it out of therapy. Didn’t they know their kid was watching?
The timer flashed, and dad started serving onto the three plates my mother had left for him.
My stomach growled again.
I wondered how many calories it took to teleport.
Of Echoes Born
I didn’t make as much progress here since the flash fiction contest was on my radar for my non-Exit writing time, but this is fine. Not in the “dog in a burning building” way, either. It really is fine.
Open Calls for Submission
Every Wednesday I try to include my list off all the various open calls for submission I’ve found and/or am trying to write for. If you know of any others, by all means do drop them in the comments and I’ll add them to the list. If this is helpful for people other than myself, it’s even better.
July to date: 1 submission (1 new).
Previously this year thus far: January was: 6 submissions (4 reprints, 2 new), 1 acceptance; in February was bare minimum: 1 submission (1 new); March brought 1 rejection, and 1 submission (new); April say 1 submission (new) and 1 acceptance; May: 1 submission (new), 1 acceptance. June: BUZZ! (Let’s not talk about that).
Chicken Soup for the Soul – Various titles, various themes, various deadlines, 1,200 word count limit.
Clarkesworld – Currently open for art, non-fiction, and short story submissions.
Cast of Wonders – Young adult short fiction market, open to story submissions up to 6,000 words.
Totally Entwined – Many calls, various dates and lengths.
Erotic Short Romances — Carina Press, an ongoing call for 10k to 17k word count limit.
The Witching Hour – Mythical creature visitation theme; deadline July 30th, 2017; 10k to 40k word count limit.
Holiday Stories – Ninestar Press is seeking queer holiday tales; deadline July 31st, 2017; 5k to 30k word count limit.
Haunted — Erotic stories centered around the theme of haunted, Mugwump Publishing; Deadline August 5th, 2017; 1k-5k word count limit.
Flint Charity Anthologies – Organized by Vicktor Alexander; deadlines throughout September, 2017; 5k to 20k word count limit.
Saints & Sinners Short Fiction Contest — Judged by Radclyffe; deadline October 3rd, 2017; 3k to 7k word count limit.
Futurescape Contest – “Blue Sky Cities” theme; 8k word count limit; deadline October 13th, 2017.
July 17, 2017
Wilde Stories 2017: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction – Steve Berman, ed. (Lethe Press)
You all know I love Out in Print, but this was extra-lovely to wake up to.
Out in Print: Queer Book Reviews
Lethe Press’s Wilde Stories has always reminded me of the Pan horror series from Britain I loved as an early teen. This review occasioned me to Google the very first Pan volume, coming across names and stories I hadn’t thought of in years, including George Fielding Eliot’s “The Copper Bowl,” a delicious torture tale about a copper bowl with spiced meat, restraints, and a hungry rat who eats his way through a traitor’s lover. That one alone provided me with some nasty dreams for weeks. The stories in the latest Wilde Stories volume are just as interesting and far-reaching as the Pan classics, and even though the tales are short on rats, they’ll still lead you to some fascinating places.
The first stop is Steve Carr’s “The Tale of the Costume Maker,” a glittery little story that demonstrates the value of keeping some treasures to yourself…
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July 13, 2017
Matches
[image error]Many moons ago, my friend (and awesome author) Mark G. Harris pointed me toward a book when I was feeling stumped about what to write. It’s called The Writer’s Book of Matches, and it has 1,001 little prompts that are designed to give you something to work with. I often flip through it when I’m in the mood to just write without a specific focus, and a few times now, those pieces have turned into short stories that have found a home in publications. The book has three kinds of prompts: A single line of dialog; a scenario or situation; and assignment prompts where the book lists a series of three characters all reacting to a particular moment/event.
I realized that I tend to now keep my own ideas in the form of these styles of prompts, to remind myself of thoughts that might, someday, be worthy of exploring. Given that I also tend to “dream in short story” many of these pop up overnight, and I scribble them down on random pieces of paper, and then…
Well. We all know what happens to those.
So. New thing. I’m going to collect them as I find/remember/come up with them and pop them into ongoing blog posts. And I’ll use the same format as that awesome little book. And if you ever find success with any of the matches, please do let me know!
In a rural area, at a big central high school that is fed students from various small towns around, fathers of popular kids are being murdered. Then a man is murdered who has a kid who isn’t popular, and thereafter another man who is childless. The detectives start to wonder what—if anything—connects them.
Five teens at a concert where the lead singer does a cover song realize they’ve slipped back in time about a decade to the same concert hall, where the original artist is singing the same song.
“It’s the last wallet you’ll ever need.”
A young woman’s cochlear implant doesn’t work—instead she starts hearing the thoughts of people around her.
The rich leader of a “Family First” anti-gay religious group is in dire need of a bone marrow transplant, and the only match on record belongs to a trans youth. How do the following people react? The trans youth, who only registered their DNA as an act of protest since gay men can’t donate; a member of the religious group, who reads about the story in the newspaper over breakfast; and the closeted reporter who leaked the story.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering which prompts from the book ended up as published stories? So far? Three of them.
[image error]In Memoriam was inspired by a discussion that came up around how much I hated the phrase “Everything happens for a reason!” but when it was time to write it, I remembered I had a piece inspired by a prompt on page 24: A man is given the ability to go back in time and change one event in his life. It turned out to be a perfect framework for the rest of the story.
“Transposition,” (included in Tricks of the Trade: Magical Gay Erotica) was completely inspired by the prompt on page 92: A family member disappears while vacationing on a cruise ship. When the editor announced the theme, I realized I already had a story rough draft pretty much complete that fit the bill.
And although it changed quite a few times, “Sweet William” (included in Saints & Sinners: New Fiction from the Festival 2016) began in its original form as inspired by one of the prompts on page 77: A death row inmate, convicted for a crime he didn’t commit, is asked to choose his last meal.
