Ill-Conceived Expedition Proofs Sent Back; New First Sunday Season Begins — Plus Art Fair Announcement

So this was my weekend.  Up till the wee hours of Saturday night/Sunday morning poring over changes to my ILL-CONCEIVED EXPEDITIONS story, “Ice Vermin” (cf. July 23, March 10, January 13), then sending the corrections back to Editor Neil Baker.  In most cases I was content to let things pass — after all it is a reprint, also available in my 2007 collection DARKER LOVES:  TALES OF MYSTERY AND REGRET for those who might wish to compare with the “author’s cut” for themselves — but there were about six items that needed either to be changed back or reworded for sake of consistency, character, or technicalities.  That said, however, from the contents it looks like a winner and, hopefully, still will be out on schedule by month’s end.

Then today brought the new “season’s” opening of the Bloomington Writers Guild/Boxcar Books sponsored First Sunday Prose Readings (cf. May 3, et al.).  Featured writers were Richard H. Durisen with an other-worldly science fiction piece, “The Long Cold” (Durisen also, I might add, has published poetry in several magazines we’ve seen mentioned here, notably DISTURBED DIGEST and ILLUMEN); Annette Oppenlander with an excerpt from her just-out second historical novel, ESCAPE FROM THE PAST — THE DUKE’S WRATH, “about a nerdy teen who, trying out an experimental computer game, unwittingly time-travels to medieval Germany”; and Jim Stark with an excerpt from GREAT LAKES SKIPPER, also a historical novel in this case based on the life of his own great-great-great grandfather.  These were followed by five open-mike readers, of whom I took the number four spot with a deconstructed fairytale, “The Glass Shoe” on what really went on with Cinderella, originally published in 2011 in Pink Nacissus Press’s RAPUNZEL’S DAUGHTERS AND OTHER TALES (cf. July 3, January 5 2011).

There will not, however, be an official First Sunday reading for September this year, that also being the weekend for Bloomington’s Fourth Street Festival of the Arts and Crafts, with the Writers Guild presenting readings there on the Spoken Word Stage (see August 30 2014, et al.).  This was announced along with a preliminary schedule of half-hour readings, both poetry and prose, with mine being billed as “horror fiction” for 4 p.m. Sunday, September 6.  While I haven’t completely decided, I’m leaning toward a presentation entirely from THE TEARS OF ISIS (last year I featured one story, “River Red,” but with two others from other sources), possibly even including another tale of Cinderella.