Deadlines

As should be fairly clear from the lack of postings, I am not as focused on the blog as I was in previous years.  Sometimes I do think about packing it in, since it can feel like a heavy burden when I want to write a post and then time slips away and I have a huge backlog (particularly of book reviews).  On the other hand, this can be a very convenient way for me to organize and plan out my theatre and music events long in advance.  It's useful for me, and possibly for others, so I'll try to keep it up for a while longer anyway.

There have been a few important deadlines at work, including prepping for an internal interview (only a lateral move, but sometime still worth pursuing) and reviewing a tall stack of proposals.  I have another bunch of proposals that have to be reviewed, though the deadline is a softer one of next Tuesday.

I'm generally good about meeting deadlines, at least when they were reasonable in the first place.  Thinking back, I only remember a couple I missed (including one by a number of minutes(!) to get a paper in for the TRB conference).  This year, I was considering sending in a proposal for the Urban History Association's annual conference in Detroit.  (It will be in October, which is just before I find out if the Orange Buffoon is re-elected, in which case I will not be returning to the States for years...)  I was working through this sociology professor I know, but then she had a conflict come up, but didn't tell anyone that she wasn't going to be submitting.  The deadline for individual proposals had passed, and, I have to admit, I was a bit upset on how this all went down.  However, I wrote to the conference organizers and explained the situation.  They agreed to give me another day to get my proposal in.  Now there is no guarantee the presentation will be accepted, but at least it is in.

Then in early February, I heard about the Newmarket Short Play Festival -- and that the deadline was still a couple of weeks away (today in fact!).  This is a pretty neat opportunity, and indeed most of my work is in that 8-10 minute range, so I already had quite a few scripts to choose from.  I narrowed it down to the best three, and then spent last night getting them ready (a few tweaks and some reformatting).  I send them off and then crashed.  While I wish they had gone in before midnight, I'm pretty confident that the submission went in, and that the email didn't bounce.*  I'll just have to steel myself for some disappointment if I am not picked, as the competition is somewhat fierce (the competition is open to all Canadians and permanent residents, and indeed I think there have been a few international submissions as well).

I haven't entirely decided if I will enter the Toronto Star short story contest again or not (the deadline is Feb. 28).  I think I would basically take one of the more successful short theatre pieces I have done and turn it into a story.  Given the past winners, I don't really write in a style that is likely to win, so there is not a lot of point in spending a lot of time and/or agonizing over a piece.  Now it is true that I have been contemplating whether a few of my more future oriented pieces might work as short stories, though I'd have to see who is really publishing short stories these days.  Interestingly, White Wall Review (where I published a poem a long time ago) seems to have done away with its review cycle (and deadlines) so I could theoretically submit at any time, though they prefer to only see one short story at a time (and then it takes 3 or so months to accept or reject a piece), but theoretically that could be 3 or 4 short stories submitted per year.  And I could submit to The Walrus as well, though that would be a much longer shot (and they don't publish genre fiction, i.e. science fiction).  In both cases, it is a bit weird that they don't seem to have firm deadlines.  I did check and The Cream City Review still has two review periods, and perhaps I will give them a shot again, as I thought they were quite a good literary journal (back when I followed such things).  It would be quite ironic if I ended up getting a few pieces accepted here or there, long after I decided not to go down the struggling writer path...

Anyway, that covers a lot of what I have been doing, though I am also working with a professor to polish up a paper from a previous TRB conference and send it off to a journal.  In this case, the deadlines are very soft and are self-imposed.  This is one of those cases, however, where working with a partner forces me to put in the time, whereas I would just come up with excuses (for not working on the paper) if it only involved me.  We currently have sent it off to a different professor to provide us with some high level feedback, and then we'll send it to the journal.  So I'm feeling pretty good about getting it to that state of readiness, and just maybe I'll finally have some more time for myself (and even the blog...).

* They just confirmed that my submissions had been received, and that I will likely hear back in April.  Fingers crossed!  Maybe I'll take this as a positive sign and go ahead and get a few submissions ready for journals.  I do have quite a few pieces I've worked up over the years and some would make the transition to short story fairly easily.