We have a winner! And a finalist! And a couple of semi-finalists! And a new writing plan for 2019!

As I posted in August, I had submitted four entries to the Moondance International Film Festival, three in the short story category and one in the short screenplay category. Last week I was looking over old submissions and realized I'd never received any notice from Moondance, and since it's been months I assumed that meant my entries hadn't placed. I tried checking their website multiple times for results, but the results link only led to a page that appeared to be down.

I decided to check again and not only does Moondance have their website issues resolved, but all four of my submissions were listed in the results:

All the winners can be found here.

Needless to say, this was very good news. I needed some encouragement with these stories. Bahama Bobby was written for the St. Petersburg Bouchercon anthology but didn't make it. It did score an Honorable Mention in this year's Writer's Digest Annual Writing Competition (in the Short Story/Genre category), so I figured it wasn't a total waste. Plus, I just love it. It was inspired by this meme, which I thought was hilarious:

Christine Thirteen was written for the most recent Sisters in Crime/LA anthology but wasn't chosen, and Deja vu, which has been around forever. was rejected by the SinC Guppies 2017 anthology (I received that news shortly before Crime Scene/Do Not Cross was accepted for LAst Resort, the 2017 SinC/LA anthology). Chick Stuff was something I wrote years ago and been filed away and forgotten. Nice to see it still has some life.

I haven't done submission posts for October and November because I haven't submitted anything recently. There were several anthologies and markets I wanted to submit to, but ultimately couldn't come up with stories for. I've also been reconsidering my "two submissions per month" plan because it's keeping me from working on larger projects while spending a lot of time and energy on markets that don't pan out. There is one more competition with a December deadline (for cinematic short stories) that I'll submit to and that will be it for 2018.

So the plan for 2019 is to work on a couple of novels. I have an A project that's been kicking around for years and a B project that's a more recent idea that will be my fallback when I hit a wall with/need a break from Project A. I also have a play that I'd like to spend some time on in the next couple of months, in the hopes that it will be ready for 2019 competitions.

There are a couple of upcoming crime anthologies (2019 Bouchercon and the San Diego Chapter of Sisters in Crime) that I definitely want to submit to since these are right up my alley, but other than that I decided I need to try to market my completed short stories to publishers, rather than trying to keep coming up with new ones whenever a theme is announced. Since most of them have placed in competitions, I'm going into 2019 with the mindset that they're worthy of publication if I can just find the right fit for them.

Happy writing everyone!