I’ll be attending my first Realm Makers Conference this week, in St. Louis. I love St. Louis. Realm Makers is a group of Christian speculative writers (mostly Science Fiction and Fantasy), so this is also the first time I will be attending a specifically SciFi/Fantasy conference. Steve Laube will be the keynote speaker. I’m really looking forward to that. And there are some wonderful workshop teachers. I’ll let you know how it went next week!
On September 15, 2020, my SciFi Novel, “The Fields of Prosperis,” won its category of the Mountain Brook Fire ‘2020 Fire Awards.’ Thank you Mountain Brook Fire!
For those of you wondering what that funny spectacled man (his name is Det) is doing on the desk of a writer, I’ll have to take you back to my childhood, when my family would make extended visits to the home of my maternal grandparents in Hof an der Saale, Germany.
As my older brother and I spoke little German amid relatives who spoke little English, we struggled to find productive activities between being doused with strawberry torte and having wars with each other using Mensch Ärgere Dich Nicht game pieces. The most delightful respites during this exertion were the Mainzelmännchen cartoon snippets.
https://germangirlinamerica.com/cartoon-men-on-german-tv/
The beauty of it for a non-bilingual was that they were mostly silent, relying on six cheerful little men/boys and clever story lines to rivet our attention. As in all good humor, they often conveyed a thought-provoking truth, well before the term ‘flash fiction’ was invented. Det, my muse, reminds me of the power of story. With or without words, the story’s the thing.