When I won the Apex Digest Halloween short story contest in 2006 for “Sufficiently Advanced,” I not only won publication of the story at pro rates and an invitation to their next anthology, I also received a ton of booty. For days afterword I got boxes with prizes donated by various sponsors, including signed books, artwork, etc. One of my favorite items was a ceramic mug that bears the same motto as the one in this post: Nothing like a cup of global domination in the morning,” along with the Apex alien logo.
Well, the domination continues. Yesterday (while ego surfing, it must be confessed) I discovered that I won this year’s contest, too, for a story called “The Fingernail Test,” which will be published in Spring 2010 in the anthology Close Encounters of the Urban Kind, edited by Jennifer Brozek. The theme of the anthology and the contest was stories where urban legends were revealed to be alien in origin. Since I’ve been writing a lot of crime fiction lately, I decided that a crime story was in order and it apparently worked for the editor.
Speaking of Global Domination, I watched the first episode of V last night. It was o-kay, but not great. Enough to keep me hanging around next week, but barely. I pleased to see Alan Tudyk among the cast–and relieved to see from the previews for next week that he’s not gone from the show. Only four episodes before a lengthy hiatus, so it might fall off my radar in 2010 unless they really pull out all the stops.
I received my contributor copies of New Love Stories, which contains my story Bed and Breakfast, a romance story with a twist. I haven’t had time to peruse the rest of the stories, but I like the way they photo illustrate the stories. They use the same models to create several different images that accompany the text. There isn’t a huge market for short romance fiction, so I was pleased to find this magazine and thrilled that they accepted my first submission to them.
I was amused to discover that last night’s episode of Criminal Minds had the same title as my essay for the 2010 Stephen King Library desk calendar: The Eyes Have It. A similar concept, too–the removal of eyes. Jay Franco, who edited the calendar this year, wrote a lengthy blog item about it.
