Tag: fun things

Impromptu Contest Day

July 27, 2012 /

It’s Friday, and it’s blessedly gray and rainy, and I am, without a doubt, the tiredest person on Earth. It’s a wonder that I’m even typing words at this point. (I am, right?)

It’s been a week of lots of good things for me. I’d like to hear about good things for other people now. Yes, it’s 1:40 on a Friday afternoon and I’m asking you to tell me your good news. Writing news is good. Rain on parched earth news is good. Getting eight consecutive hours of sleep news is awesome. Tell me what’s made your world a little brighter this week.

As an added bonus, let’s throw Phoenix in the mix. If you share good news and also want a copy of Phoenix, say so. If there’s more than one request, we’ll have one of our fabulous kid-run drawings and someone will win.

Comments are absolutely open. I’ll leave them that way until tomorrow evening.

Hey! Look!

June 25, 2012 /

It’s the table of contents for the inaugural issue of Specutopia! Yes, that is my name right in the middle of it.

How I ended up there is kind of a funny story. I’m not going to share the whole thing, mostly because it would involve confessing to being a flake at times, and I’m not in a confessional mood. But I will tell you that it all started with checking my spam. Look, I said to myself, an email from Specutopia. They must want me to subscribe.

Things got more confusing from there. Somewhere around the point of seeing “Ash and Dust” I figured out that it was a personal email. At an even later point it sunk in that, rather than being the recipient of the world’s most personal subscription request, I was being invited to submit a story. Some days I’m appallingly slow.

Anyway, “Water Child” will be appearing in Specutopia in July. It looks like an exciting lineup, and I encourage everyone to buy a copy next month. I promise to say a little more about “Water Child” then.

In summary

June 23, 2012 /

Camping was good.

Perhaps I should say a bit more than that. Camping was mostly good. This was not wonderful, backcountry, no one around for miles camping. This was pull your car up to the site, pitch your tent, walk to the camp store if you forgot something camping.

But when you live in the woods anyway, sometimes it’s fun to go someplace that feels like a little tent city. We could walk down to the pond and swim in the morning. We could leave and go to the ocean in the afternoon. We could wander the mud flats in search of creatures as the tide went out, and look at diamondback terrapin nesting sites in the dunes.

The less fabulous parts involved vomiting, and children leaping into poison ivy thickets, and coming home.

But overall, it was good. Gray, but no rain. Chilly, but not unbearably so. And then there was that tour of the old whaler’s home we went on in search of information about whaling, only to receive a fine lecture on the evolution of the indoor toilet instead.

What’s not to love about vacations?

The absent writer

June 11, 2012 /

Have you ever read Breakfast at Tiffany’s? I would love to have a calling card that says: Jennifer Mason-Black, Traveling. However, it would not be useful to me, as I am never traveling.

Except now.

More precisely, I will be away in the woods in a tent, completely unplugged from the world, except when I check back with home periodically. When I am not hiking, or examining moon snails, or wandering much larger shores than I normally do, I will be rediscovering the thrill of writing in a notebook. By hand. With a pen. That is what one does when camping.

Were I the sort of person who thinks ahead, there might be blog posts to come while I am away. I am not that kind of person. This is not that kind of blog. This is the kind of blog that will be completely silent for days, at which point everyone will have given up all hope that there will ever be posts again.

But there will. I’ll be back with stories about camping. I promise.

In the meantime, a few notes. I’ve updated my list of forthcoming publications. There are a few new things. I apparently have something coming out every month between July and October, and likely two things one of those months. That is both exciting and odd.

Also, Phoenix is now available everywhere. By that, I mean also at Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, and Rainbow eBooks, along with Musa and Amazon. I think that’s the full list.

I should be back to posting around June 22. It will be summer here.

Until then, live boldly and dream of wild things.

And the winner is…

May 31, 2012 /

Hey! It makes it really hard to wait in line at the Registry when the Registry’s not in the place it’s supposed to be! Totally great that the nice man wearing this tee shirt was able to take my check eventually, but it would have been even more awesome had I been able to find his office where the website said it would be.

But that’s all water under the bridge. You don’t want to hear about that. You want to hear about winners. The answer? Everyone wins! That’s how I play this game. At least that’s how I play it when I have three awesome contestants. Mary and Julia, if you’d like a copy of Phoenix, please email me with your preference as to file type. I can send you either a PDF or something suitable for a Kindle or a Nook. Are there more types? I think they’re all available. Just let me know. My email is on the About Me page.

What about Nancy? Nancy is the sort of person who is unfailingly supportive. Nancy is the kind of woman who will listen to a garbled message on an answering machine and manage to pluck out the essential “please enter a contest on my blog so I’m not lonely” bit and go right out and do it. In short, Nancy is the kind of friend every writer needs.

So she doesn’t get a copy of Phoenix. Instead, she gets a hard copy of Wren, hopefully in another week or so. Prize or punishment? It remains to be seen.

Thanks for playing!

It’s Thursday

May 31, 2012 /

It’s also May 31, which means I will be standing in line at the Registry of Motor Vehicles today, waiting to renew the car registrations I had totally forgotten about until I was cleaning off the counters late yesterday afternoon.

But back to the Thursday thing, that means it’s everyone’s final chance to enter the fabulous Contest Contest! Or not. I’m pretty flexible about things like contests, given my general lack of winningness.

If you do want to enter, please do so by 5:00ish, Eastern Standard Time. There is every likelihood I will remember to come back and close comments by dinner, provided I’m not still in line at the Registry. I will definitely remember to announce winners before bed tonight.

See you back here later today!

Three things

May 26, 2012 /

First, a PSA. It’s turtle season, at least in New England. Turtles are slow on land, and they tend to either amble faster or hide in their shells when frightened. Neither action does much to protect them from cars. This time of year, female turtles are hunting for nesting sites, and their journey often requires crossing roads. Around where I live, it means they’re venturing across winding rural highways, and many don’t survive.

Please, if you can, help them cross (always in the direction they are already traveling). If you can’t stop, at least watch for them in areas where roads border water. I thank you. Future generations of turtles thank you.

Second, if you like contests, consider checking out the Musa Memorial Day Blog Hop. Lots of contests, lots of opportunities to win a variety of ebooks!

Third, there’s still time to enter my thoroughly puzzling contest. There are also awesome entries now! They make me smile. I invite everyone to join them, though if no one else does, I think it may end up being a contest composed entirely of winners.

The contest contest

May 24, 2012 /

I’ve been absent here due to general hectic life stuff. I’ve been revising Wren in depressing little stretches, and it’s been making me a little blue. I’m looking forward to things evening out so that I spend less time in the car and more time being productive in concrete ways.

In the meantime, I’ve been trying to come up with a contest. I have a secret dislike of contests, mostly because I’m the least winning person in the history of the world. Give me a contest in which 99% of contestants win, and I’ll be the one getting the pat on the back as someone whispers “not sure how she could have lost that one.”

But I have a copy or two of Phoenix available, and I’d like to figure out how to offer them up. Perhaps the answer is this: the contest should be coming up with a suitable contest. Give me a contest designed to highlight skills that are under-appreciated or all but unknown, or that involves clowns and monkeys. Give me a contest that allows those who never win to win.

And give it to me at some point in the next week. I’ll leave this post open to comments about contests, either a design or your least/most winning moment, until next Thursday evening (May 31). After that, I’ll invite my kids to help pick a winning entry in some random way, one most likely involving blindfolds. The winner(s) will get a copy of Phoenix in their format of choice. (If the number of entrants is higher than I suspect, there will be two winners.)