For those of you who didn’t notice, I failed to write a single post during the month of November. I didn’t forget about you. November was packed with all kinds of distractions. The first half of November was spent preparing for and then attending a science conference (Society for Redox Biology and Medicine) in San Francisco. I had a blast and learned a lot, but couldn’t get a whole lot of writing time in. The conference ended the weekend before Thanksgiving and I stayed in San Francisco to spend it with some family in the area. Because this post is light on visuals, I made this little squirrel to represent how I felt after the week of Thanksgiving:

November, as many of you know, was also National Novel Writing Month. I never participate in NaNoWriMo, but I did plan on getting my book edited. Sadly, after spending weeks without any creative outlet, I couldn’t bear the thought of editing. Instead, starting Thanksgiving week, I began a short story project. The story has been bouncing around in my head for a while, but I now had a reason to get it out on paper.

That reason is the Jim Baen Memorial short story award. I stumbled on to this contest last year, but couldn’t meet the deadline (Feb. 1^st). The thing I love most about this contest, besides the fact that it is free to enter, is that they allow short stories of up to 8000 words in length. I have a hard time writing stories shorter than 4000 words, which is the norm for most contests. The other thing I love about this contest, is its mission. Not only is it requesting strictly science fiction stories, but stories that can help inspire scientific progress. This isn’t just meaningless propaganda either. They will give the top three finalists free admission to the 2017 International Space Development Conference as well as a bunch of other prizes.

I am almost finished with the short story and hope to share more details in the near future. In short, it is about a Mars rover operator who finds himself in a position to save the life of a Martian astronaut. I am tempted to call it brilliant, but I am still coming down from a creativity high. Its true quality will be determined during editing.

For my last bit of news,  I participated in the Twitter SFFpit event for a few hours earlier today. I had one acquisitions manager from a small press show interest in Quotidian but I am holding out for a literary agent who can get me the best deal. For those of you who don’t know, SFFpit is very much like other Twitter pitch contests. Summarizing your book in 140 characters is no easy feat. To give you an idea of how short that is, this sentence is 132 characters long with spaces, and I haven’t even included the hashtag. You can check out my twitter feed on the bottom of the page to see what variations I tried. The SFF pitch event was hosted by Dan Koboldt. If you recognize his name, it’s because I recently wrote a guest post for him on Enclosed Ecosystems and Life Support.

December will be a bit light on posts as well as I will be in lab for 10+ hours a day trying to crank out some data before the holidays. Speaking of holidays, I will be in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, so there is little to no chance of me blogging during that time. I will be on a beach somewhere drinking cocktails and soaking my pale Seattle skin in sunlight.

With that, I am behind on editing and have a lot more to do before I can send my book to beta readers early next year. I’ve already put together a beta-reader book cover (below)! Wish me luck.