My novel, Prodigies, was to have been launched this month, but like every other plan over the last year, that plan didn’t account for the arrival of the pandemic. A series of cascading delays swept through the publishing industry last year, as spring releases wee delayed until fall, fall until winter and so on.
Prodigies is now scheduled to hit the shelves this July. I’m pitching it to literary festivals now and hoping I’ll have the chance to promote it live, in person. If we’re all still in pandemic mode come autumn, maybe you’ll be able to catch me online.
Delays also struck a few of my short stories that were accepted for publication last year. I now have a story entitled Frank 2.0 appearing in an anthology of western Canadian SF, fantasy and horror. Watch for the anthology, entitled Alternate Plains, coming out this fall from Great Plains Publications. My creative non-fiction piece on cycling and stoicism, Pilgrim on a Freedom Machine, will come out this year in the anthology Write to Move.
Before those books are available, the winter 2021 issue of the Calgary literary magazine FreeFall will include my pandemic-inspired bit of magical realism, The Going and the Gone.
I’m slowly working on a sequel to Prodigies in hopes of having it available to offer to my publisher by summer.
Other than that, much of my creative writing energy in the last year has been directed to stand up comedy. I started performing at open mike events not long before the pandemic and have recently begun doing monthly stand-up on Facebook Live. Look me up at Club Zuckerberg and you might catch my latest act.
Just tip your server and drive home carefully.