Short Story Acceptance! "Luna Britannia"

I'm so excited to announce that my short story "Luna Britannia" will be published by For Page & Screen Magazine in their first issue, which is themed "New Beginnings."

I'll share more details on this story when the publication goes live in January. For now, here's some AI art (from the wombo app) that I made for this story:

Longlisted Story from Uncharted Mag!

I'm delighted to share that one of my short stories made the long list in the Uncharted Magazine Summer Sci-Fi/Fantasy Short Story Award contest! This will be narrowed down to a short list next week. Their announcement is here: Uncharted Magazine Long List

Awards Eligibility 2021

Thanks to the very supportive speculative fiction writer community online, I'm now aware that anything published in 2021 is eligible for awards season! I'm still brand new to this and don't completely understand it, but since I had my very first fiction publication this year, I'm creating this post to share on Twitter.

Speculative Short Story publication - August 2021: "Yoko and the Sunbeam Garden" by Meg Murray in the anthology GROWTH from TL;DR Press.

Links here: Amazon paperback or Kindle version 

Thank you for your support, readers! 

Mid-Month NaNoWriMo 2021 Update

National Novel Writing Month is halfway done! Or there's halfway to go depending on your outlook...

Lessons I'm learning about myself as a writer during this year's NaNoWriMo effort:

- I draft much better when I'm confident in the outline of the story.

- I still discover things about my characters as I'm writing even if I have a detailed plot & character arc outline.

- Having a writing community (or multiple communities) is really encouraging!

- Visual graphs of my progress help to keep me going.

I'm having a lot of fun writing this draft of my novel. I put it away for all of 2020 because...pandemic / quarantine / moving across states / finishing college / parenting / homeschooling... But reconnecting with virtual writing groups as well as having two short stories published gave me the boost I needed to come back to the novel. Inspired by other writers online, I created a mood board for the novel and I'm tracking my word count progress on Twitter.

How I'm doing so far:

I'm approaching the 25% mark in the outline so it looks like this draft will end up at 100k words when it's finished.

Happy writing, everyone!

- Meg

NaNoWriMo 2021

I decided to join NaNoWriMo this year at the last minute as a way to motivate myself to complete the beta draft of my novel manuscript. Over the summer, I fixed up the outline and filled in all of the plot holes in the messy Franken-draft. I workshopped various chapters from this draft with my Atlanta critique group, but never had a cohesive story. With the overhaul of the outline, I had to move some chapters around, condense the overall timeline, and cut a bunch of scenes (some of which could be saved for a potential sequel novel).

So my NaNo goal is to edit/write at least 1667 words/day (50,000 words/month), but hopefully more. I have 44 chapters in the novel, so if I can get one or two chapters written (or rewritten) per day, that would be a great pace to having an actual completed manuscript that I could send to beta readers!! I finished Chapter 1 today and began to write (the brand-new) Chapter 2...

Here's the NaNoWriMo site if you'd like more info: https://nanowrimo.org/

Happy writing, Everyone!

--Meg

Reading Recommendations at Bookshop.org

I love supporting independent bookstores, so I was excited to learn about Bookshop.org, which is a great way to buy books online if you don't want to go the big biz (billionaire) route! I became an affiliate with Bookshop so that I can curate and recommend themed reading lists and link to my reviews on this blog. It's like a playlist for books!

I've started a "Speculative Short Fiction" list and my first recommendation is an anthology I read in September called New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color edited by Nisi Shawl. 

I loved so many stories in this, but a few really stood out to me: (1) "The Robots of Eden" by Anil Menon, (2) "The Virtue of Unfaithful Translations" by Minsoo Kang, and (3) "Burn the Ships" by Alberto Yáñez. I will be posting reviews of individual stories in the future. Each story in the collection has a vibe of its own so I recommend taking a pause between each story to let it sink in before beginning to read the next one.

Publication: GROWTH from TL;DR Press

It's here! My beautiful paperback copy of GROWTH: A Speculative Young Adult Collection has arrived containing my short story "Yoko and the Sunbeam Garden." I'm so honored to have this story out in the world.

All proceeds from the eBook & paperback sale of this collection will be donated to the Young People's Trust for the Environment. Check them out here: https://ypte.org.uk/

Buy the book here: Amazon paperback or Kindle version 

Thanks for your support, readers! 

Below is my favorite paragraph from the story:

Cover Reveal for GROWTH

TL;DR Press has revealed the cover for GROWTH: A Speculative Young Adult Collection, which will feature 24 short stories and poems, including mine titled "Yoko and the Sunbeam Garden." Release date coming soon...

 

Short Story Acceptance! "Yoko and the Sunbeam Garden"

Coming in September 2021!

Thrilled to announce that my speculative fiction short story "Yoko and the Sunbeam Garden" was accepted into a YA anthology called GROWTH by TL;DR Press. It will be published in September in both eBook and print forms. TL;DR Press is a charity publisher so all proceeds will benefit YPTE, the Young People's Trust for the Environment.

Submitting Short Stories is Addicting

My summer 2021 update is that I'm submitting short stories to publications and contests again--and it feels addictive! I've finally revisited some stories I workshopped pre-pandemic with my old Atlanta writer's group, Decatur Scribes. I've finished the necessary edits and sent away two stories, one to a contest and one to an anthology. I'm finishing a third story to send an online publication this week.

My other news for July is that I'm taking a personal staycation/writer's retreat for 3 days next week. I'll be staying at a nice little VRBO apartment to focus only on writing. I'm making progress on my novel draft with the hope of submitting for the Pitch Wars mentorship contest this year. Here's the info about that if you're interested: https://pitchwars.org/new-start-here/

Happy writing, Everyone!

--Meg

Publication: Greyrock Review 2021

The 2021 Issue of Greyrock Review has been published! 

My literary nonfiction story "A Library on Wheels" appears from pages 94-103 in the online edition here: GREYROCK REVIEW 2021. 

I hope you enjoy this little pre-pandemic story about a school district librarian working to bring the joy of books to students all over her area with this traveling school bus library!

It's so exciting to see my words in print and my name (nonfiction/married name: Megan Maulsby) on the back cover:

Short Story Acceptance! "A Library on Wheels"

I received a short story acceptance in January (hooray!) for my creative nonfiction tale about a book mobile program in Georgia. I had a wonderful time interviewing the librarians who built the book mobile out of an old school bus for their public school district as well as one of the drivers and a school media specialist who brought kids onto the bus to get free books. As much fun as it was to see the children using the book mobile, there were already a lot of newspaper articles written about the end user experience. So I focused my story on the genesis of the idea, the creation of the program, and the conversion of the school bus. The story, "A Library on Wheels," will be published by the Greyrock Review, the undergraduate literary journal for Colorado State University, in May 2021.