pegkerr: (Telperion and Laurelin)
[personal profile] pegkerr
My cousin Jill's Year of Adventure suggestion for me was to take a couple of hours volunteering together to plant some trees with Great River Greening. So, we signed up for a shift, and last Saturday on a beautiful sunny day, the two of us, along with her partner Jack, met in a park in Brooklyn Center.

The volunteer coordinators had the process down to a well-rehearsed presentation, and we three ended up planting three trees in all in the two-hour time slot. The first two were straightforward enough, and third, a Catalpa, had evidently been in the pot too long. The tap root had pushed through the hole in the bottom and grown large enough to embed itself into the plastic. It took a twenty minutes struggle to get it out of the pot.

It was hot by the time we finished up, and I'd exerted myself enough during the struggle with the stubborn tree to be glad to drink down the water I'd brought and sit in the shade a bit. But we enjoyed ourselves, and there are now three new trees in a park in Brooklyn Center, thanks to our efforts. Afterward, we drove to Jack and Jill's house for lunch, where I admired their extensive gardens and patio under the beautiful spreading oak tree.

A day well spent in the outdoors.

Image description: Lower center: head and shoulders of two women and a man, wearing hats, smiling at the camera. Center: The same three people are planting a tree. Overlaid over the tree are the words "Great River Greening."

Tree Planting

22 Tree Planting

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Well, this is mortifying

Jun. 2nd, 2025 10:21 am
pegkerr: (Default)
[personal profile] pegkerr
As I posted last Saturday, I have been working to assemble an anthology to submit to a contest with the Minnesota Authors Project (among others). I hadn't assembled as many authors as I had hoped, but we put together a nice little ebook, and I was proud of it and excited to enter the contest. We finished pulling it all together by 6 pm the day before the final deadline, and I went to the contest portal to submit it.

And at the last minute, after I had spent a good 40 minutes working my way through the portal and was just about to push the 'Submit' button, a Terms and Agreement page popped up that turned all my hopes to ashes.

The book had to be already published.

Now, I had inquired about that. The person I'd gotten the flyer from wasn't sure, and the website didn't mention anything about that requirement.

I had arranged with a letter of agreement with my authors specifically stating my understanding that this WASN'T a promise of publication, but that if we won the contest, we could make decisions about publishing at that time.

So, extremely mortified, I had to go back to the authors and explain. I'd done my due diligence, I had wondered about that very question, checked the website and the flyer, and I'd still gotten it wrong.

Some of the contributors wondered whether we could quickly self-publish, throwing it up on Amazon, of course the very reasonable expectation requested was that I would then promote and distribute it. I had very little time to make the decision, and I never heard back from one of my contributors, and I was badly rattled by making such a mistake. Maybe it was a lack of courage, but I just couldn't make the promise. I don't have my own website or any kind of mailing list. I didn't think I could (after letting my contributors down so badly) volunteer to do something that would let them down even further.

So we missed the contest deadline.

I am going to try to find more contributors and figure out a way to publish it. And hope that we can enter it in the contest next year.

I feel so very mortified and foolish. At least two of the contributors wrote new material for this project, and I feel keenly that I let them down. Professional embarrassment is the WORST.

But! This is the year of adventure, and that means trying new things. And sometimes, when you try new things, you fail. And that (I am telling myself firmly) is okay.

Here is the beautiful cover that Bruce Bethke designed for the book we had planned, and I hope eventually it will come to fruition.

Shelves of Wonder cover
pegkerr: (The worthies of Bree will be discussing)
[personal profile] pegkerr
This is sort of a last-week-and-this-week collage.

I recently had a new coworker start at my workplace who came from a job in a library system. She happened to mention in passing at a staff meeting that she was involved in organizing a writing contest for both individual and group projects. Intrigued, I sounded her out and asked her to tell me more.

She showed me the flyer, and one sentence stuck out for me:
In addition to being evaluated on quality, judges will also consider the role libraries have
played in supporting the organization or the creation of the work being submitted.
Now, I just happened to have a story hanging around in my computer that I had submitted to an anthology years ago, but it was rejected on the basis that it wasn't so much a story about bookstores (the anthology's theme) as about libraries. I'd tried various markets but had never sold it, but I still liked the story and had always thought it deserved an audience.

What's more, I knew that two of my friends had written stories about libraries, too: ([personal profile] naomikritzer and [personal profile] lydamorehouse). Could I get a few more, and we could submit it as a group project?

So, as part of my Year of Adventure, I have been doing something this past week that I've never tried before: I have been assembling an anthology. I was also able to solicit a story from Marissa Lingen and a poem from [personal profile] elisem. Another friend, Bruce Bethke, graciously agreed to put together the anthology's layout. (Bruce has had some experience with online publishing with his online anthology series Stupifying Stories.)

I will be submitting the contest entry later today.

(This is not the anthology's cover, but an image created in the spirit of the whole thing). The collection will be titled: Shelves of Wonder: Fantastic Stories Celebrating Libraries.

Wish us luck!

Description: Partial view of two arches. Behind the one on the right side is a portion of a tall bookshelf loaded with books. Behind the other arch to the left is a portion of a shining full moon, overwritten with the words "Shelves of Wonder."

Anthology

21 Anthology

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Matthew Daly

December 2012

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