Catching up on my weekend email and holy heck…The Ontario Writers’ Conference held a Story Starters Contest and I’m a 2015 Finalist!

Wow!

Entrants for the contest wrote 100 word prose or poems inspired by a selected picture.  The multi-talented publisher of Piquant Press, James Dewar, judged the final round entries and decided upon 12 finalists.

Here are my entries:

September (art inspiration by Lorette C. Luzajic)

This overcast day screams for bubbles. It stopped raining. Rain, or tears from heaven? It doesn’t matter now. I watch the wisps of liquid sunshine floating on the delicate spheres. When they disappear, I take another deep breath and pause. Slippery coolness envelopes my clubbed fingers. How many more breaths do I have left? Exhaled into a tiny prison, my breath is freed from its cage. The wind spirits my life away. Past pedestrians in the morning rush, it kisses a red car. My last dance. The bubble pops, delivering my gift to another soul.

October (art inspiration by Joe Cebek)

Today, I start the countdown. Enough warnings. When first I let my children loose among my gardens, they prospered. Each generation brought a deeper insight into the learning of those who went before. There was, I remember, a time of peace. Under my watchful guidance, they filled the aching expanse. How I loved them, my seeds of inspiration. Yet now they dredge the last ounces of my veins. Seek not the stars to escape my tempest. I shall wash your sins away with my bounteous tears. We will begin anew, your surviving grasses making lush the dryness of my heart.

 

This is great news to read after a day of intense editing of The Queen’s Viper. Now I have the energy to work for two more hours, or spin around in my chair really, really fast for a long, long time.

I highly recommend that readers of my blog shimmy over to the OWC site and read all the great entries from September to December. Thank you to Mr. Dewar and the other judges for their times. Good luck to my fellow finalists! Thank you very much to the artists who submitted their work for inspiration: Lorette Luzajic, Joe Cebek, Joanna Malcolm and Christine Kim.