UPDATE –
11-4-11 Edward’s Heart screenplay adaptation has made it into the second-round qualifiers for the 2012 KAOS British Short Screenplay Competition!
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Last Friday night, October 1, I arrived home from my two weeks in Greece. The accomodations, meals and local transportation at Limnisa International Writers Retreat, comprised the prize I’d won for my 2009 short story “Edward’s Heart,” which was selected as a winner in the Blue Thumbnail international short story contest.
My promise to myself was to write a minimum of five stories while there to complete my short story collection, Under a Gibbous Moon, to be published in 2011. And, I did indeed keep that promise, as well as create two additional story ideas which also may find their way into the collection.
A fecundity of writing is contagious at Limnisa, where the Aegean soughs against the rocky shore, setting a rhythm into which all of us writers quickly fell. Waking into agreed-upon silence, we breakfasted together then parted to write, each into her own solitary niche somewhere in the semi-wild landscape of the seaside villa or on a veranda overlooking Limnisa Bay.
At lunch, we shared bits of our work, ideas about writing and information about ourselves, which the other writers scribbled down to shamelessly use in their current or future works. Our hosts, Philip Wooderson and Mariel Hacking, are charming, attentive, extremely generous and fine writers in their own right.
This was a priceless adventure as well as an extremely fruitful one, literarily speaking. I recommend, whole-heartedly, doing whatever you can to give yourself a writing week or two at Limnisa. And, right now,believe in your own short stories enough to enter them in next year’s Blue Thumbnail competition and win for yourself this magnificent opportunity to write in Greece.
This year’s theme is “Blue” and the deadline is 02.01.2011 (which, from this side of the world, I’m not sure means February 1st or January 2nd). Break a pencil and Good Luck!
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Blue Thumbnail is the international online literary journal which selected my short story “Edward’s Heart” as one of its winning entries. For that honor, I won a two-week expense-paid stay at Limnisa, a Writers’ Retreat on the Greek island of Methana.
Here is the direct link to “Edward’s Heart” http://www.bluethumbnail.com/CompetitionStories/EDWARDSHEART.html. I do hope you find the story engaging and worthy of your investment of time and attention.
Here is the main link to Blue Thumbnail http://bluethumbnail.com/. In addition to enjoying the other fine writing in the journal, I suggest you consider giving the authors your comments and submitting your own short fiction.
And, here is the link to Limnisa http://www.limnisa.com/index.html. I shall be taking the last two week’s of September, 2010, to discover all that Limnisa has to offer. It is also my intention to use the time there to complete the additional 7 stories for my upcoming collection of short stories, Under a Gibbous Moon, to be published in 2011.