The Real Award
Summer continues in full swing! And we got some surprising yet welcome news. My favorite game got its latest expansion, and we march ever onward to the start of the next school year.
Publishing News
Last time I mentioned Transmentation | Transience got short listed for the Many Wade Wellman award. Well, we actually won! Out of the five of us, I was the only one able to attend in person and accept, and that meant also giving my first-ever acceptance speech for an award! You can read the text here if you're interested. I am a "can fake it but I hate it" introvert when it comes to cosplaying an extrovert. John Scalzi was sitting next to me when I delivered the speech, so it was pretty nerve-wracking. All said, it was a good experience and I ate dinner with some lovely people from RavenCon.
I wanted to stay at ConGregate longer, but I promised to take my kids to Greensboro (how ironic) to hit a water park. So I left after dinner and came right back to Greensboro the next day. That was also a good time! I plan to attend for longer next year.
What I'm Writing
My agent sent me back copy edits after a few months of waiting, and I sent them back to him. Now, we wait and see. He mentioned we're not going on submission until after Labor Day, due to how the publishing industry works. He mentioned most editors are on vacation during August (sounds nice!).
I'm also nearing completion on a short story I'm co-writing with Liz Pipher, an MFA cohort of mine and fellow Many Worlds member. I'm excited about it, and collaborating has been a blast.
I also have a fantasy novel drafted that I need to revise, but I'm waiting for school to finish before I do. That way I can hit it every day and keep everything about it firmly in-mind.
A Note About Awards
Winning an award is such an honor, which I feel compelled to mention because otherwise what follows might sound like I'm against them. I'm not! I do think though that winning them is really a nice-to-have and won't ever be a goal for me. I know, easy for me to say now that I've won one. For me, getting something published is the award, and any other extra recognition is just icing.
Publishing is such a hard business, adding extra hard-to-attains on top of the already-hard-to-attains just feels like unnecessarily punishing yourself, and can lead to unhelpful bitter feelings.
I feel writing can be isolating and is why it can be easy to put so much energy into hoping you win something, so I'm grateful for the writing communities I belong to, the wonderful people I learn from there, and the perspective such places provide.
So whether you're writing or doing anything else, my advice, for whatever it's worth, is make the cool thing you're doing the cool thing, and everything else can be a nice surprise.
What I'm Playing
Marvel Champions. Sooo much Marvel Champions. My fave game got its most recent release, and it is so much fun. The new expansion box has Daredevil and Echo as heroes, and six villains including Kingpin! I played through it once, but plan on keeping it ready to roll for when I take my kids to the trampoline parks.
I have this thing where I usually oscillate from competitive games and cooperative games. Marvel Champions is cooperative, and you can play it solo. You win together and you lose together, and it's fun to play with my kids (or by myself).
That said, my son, Travis, caught a competitive bug, and begged me to play Magic: the Gathering, much to my dismay. I don't like that game, and find it hard to enjoy. We bought the two-player Marvel themed curiosity box, and had fun with it. I brought up Star Wars: Unlimited, a game I played that I found to have much more fun with and a more modern design, and set it up just to see if he'd like it.
He did! So we bought some cards for it and he asked me, unprompted, to play it. We plan on going to our weekly meetups at the local game store.
What I Painted
I played Marvel: Crisis Protocol a bit but quickly bounced off it. I loved playing X-Men, but my local players were so skilled it felt like I didn't have agency in the game, nor did I have the time to "get good" given my kids were very young when I played.
Still, Nightcrawler remains my favorite comic character, bar none, and I still bought him for the game and painted him. I'm revisiting playing the game casually, now that the game has been rebalanced, and I learned they are making a co-op line for this game so I'm excited to play that!
From the Mouths of Babes
My daughter heard Evanescence for the first time and likes to sing along. "WAKE ME UP AND DIE!" has been a mantra of hers, which is actually kind of on point with how waking her up feels like.
