Well, I guess it’s about time to dust off this blog again, what with the summer coming and all.

Things have been busy, but not necessarily with The Ward of Heaven.  I’m usually at the Purcellville Community Market once a month with one or two of the other published authors from my local writing group, but most of my writing has been for the Purcellville Gazette, where I’m now on the masthead as a contributing writer; I’ve been specializing in the Western Loudoun arts scene, including writers and music.

Also, I just finished editing a two-volume anthology for the Young Voices Foundation, which is on Amazon and will probably be released this week.  It entailed reading through about 400 short stories (out of 1,000 submitted), choosing the 90 best, getting permission to publish from each author, then laying it out into a PDF for publication.  A huge work, but a great learning experience and chance to read some great writing by some talented young folks.

And as the school year comes to a close, I’ve decided on my summer writing project: The Day the Hamster Died and Other Stories (True Confessions of a Substitute Teacher).  All names, of course, changed to protect the innocent and the guilty both.  In the meantime, recognizing the young writers of the anthology got me to thinking about my first literary triumph…so here’s the story.

Recognition is a heady thing. My 9th grade English teacher convinced me to enter a sonnet into a Shakespeare competition in Omaha.  A few weeks later, I found myself at the bookstore sitting in a row with other writers who had won honorable mention, receiving a grey “Shakespeare on the Green” T-shirt (with “What a piece of work is man!” on the back) and feeling like the shelves were swirling around me.  The sonnet was about a ship being sunk at sea, and the bookstore floor felt like a heaving deck.

When I got to the microphone, the lines tumbled out with all the grace of a ship running aground under full sail in a gale, but I survived the trip back to my chair, where I collapsed. But, literary pride ranking above hygiene in my teenage male mind, you better believe I wore that T-shirt every day it wasn’t in the wash.