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The mutterings of a half-mad Canuck who writes stuff

Author: MS Manz (Page 5 of 5)

Here’s What I’m Going to Do

June 21, 2016 / / 1 Comment

Cover for Human 76There’s a funny thing about contributing to an anthology that I’ve never really considered much before now, perhaps mostly because this is the first time I’ve been a contributor without also being an editor. With Human 76, I was involved in discussions and conversations about the stories and the process, and I did read early drafts of a few of the stories. But I haven’t read most of the stories in the book at all and I haven’t read the final versions of any of them, save my own.

I have ordered my paperback copies, of course. One for me, one for my Dad, and a couple for the library of the school where I teach. I had them all shipped to my parent’s place in Canada, because we’ll be visiting there in a few weeks and it was drastically more expensive to have them shipped to China. I was planning to wait until  we got there to read the book, but… well, I don’t want to wait that long.

And that’s when I had the idea to do what I’m going to do.

I have grabbed a copy of the ebook, which is available for free right now through Lulu.com and soon through Amazon, and I am not going to wait. I’ll read and review each individual story here on the blog, one every other day.

It will be glorious!

Human 76 is Now a Thing

June 17, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Cover for Human 76A large part of the reason I’ve been pushing myself to get the site re-design done over the last few days is because I knew this beautiful thing was going to be ready this week and I wanted to be able to tell people about it.

Human 76 started as a family photo shoot with a twist – you can read about the projects origins here – and quickly became another in a growing list of rewarding and fulfilling projects undertaken by one of the wonderfullest groups of people on the planet. Michael Wombat did a wonderful write-up on the development from “wouldn’t it be neat” to finished book, which is only fitting as he was (as usual) the driving force that got the whole thing done.

The book contains 15 stories from 14 authors (myself included) each of which connects to the others in ways none of us could have foreseen when we started. It’s a shared-world, linked-storied, post-apocalyptic anthology, about a young woman on a journey to find and rescue her sister. It’ s suitable for a PG-13 audience, and it is very, very good.

It will be a free e-book for a few weeks (I’ll post a link as soon as it goes up) and is available now as a luxurious, creamy-smooth, reasonably-priced luxury paperback through Lulu.com. All monies from both versions will go to Water is Life, a charity whose mission speaks loudly to all of the people involved in making this book, and whose mission couldn’t be a better fit, thematically, for the stories we wrote.

I encourage everyone to get a copy, and to read it, and to tell me what you think.

And then read it again.

Welcome to the Umpteenth Version of This

June 17, 2016 / / 0 Comments

I have to admit, this blog has been through so many versions in the past three years that I feel like I should refer to it as Version mumble-mumble. Like some not-as-old-as-the-character-she’s-portraying leading lady pretending to be coy about her age to Tom Hanks in a 1980s rom-com. Truth is I really don’t know how to count what iteration this is of this blog. I haven’t really been keeping track.

What I do know is that there comes a time in every blog’s life when everything that has gone before must be burned to the ground to make way for new growth. To outsiders this might seem like willful and senseless destruction. It may seem wasteful of all the work that went into it up to that point.

But it’s really not.

You see, the value of all that work was not in the result, but in the process. In creating and maintaining, and failing to maintain my previous blog, I learned a lot about how to do all that. I also got to figure out some things that worked well for me, and a lot of things that didn’t. I refined my ideas about what I want to do, what I don’t, and what (and who) this blog is for.

And once you’ve burned down the past, you can use the ashes to fertilize the future.

So… yeah. I deleted the old blog and started over again – this time with more fertilizer.

I don’t yet know how often I’ll be posting, or exactly what I’ll be posting about. One of the things I figured out in the last go-around was that I should probably be more organic.

I do want to focus more on my writing work, so I’ll be talking about projects I’m working on, and I’ll post snippets and flash fiction and so forth as it seems appropriate. I’ll also write about writing from time to time as I figure out what I’m doing and learn new things as a writer, but only if I think it would be interesting to people who read my fiction. Because that’s who this blog is for – the people who read, and enjoy, my writing.

Both of you.

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