Chicken Soup & Adventures!

Adventure stories & hiking adventures for the win + sapphic september recs

Sep 23, 2024

Books

I sold a story to Chicken Soup! It’ll be in their upcoming Christmas book, under the pen name I’m trying to build for memoir pieces - Virigina Mueller.

Events

I snuck in an unexpected event this month - volunteering with the Speculative Literature Foundations’ booth at Printer’s Row! It was a hot day and I got a sunglasses tan.

Learned at Poplar Creek that my ace flag has become a cat chew toy.

I also attended the Popular Creek Library on Sept 21st. This was my first time doing a repeat event - and I can happily say I sold more books this year than last. I also had a first, a reader coming up to my booth and whipping out copies of Fae Deals and Fae Dreams for me to sign. I was so honored! But also flubbed my IRL first interaction with a fan - I was so overwhelmed I forgot to ask her name 😅

Capricon panels are still in the brainstorming bit, and oof is there so many about fandom. Which makes me giggle with joy.

We’re also getting real close to the kickoff of

Illinois Novel Quest

, the NaNo alternative I’m running with a few IL ex-MLs. Please subscribe to the substack if you want to stay informed on the prep workshops we’re offering in October and the nearly 30 write-ins we’ll have around Chicagoland libraries in November.

Gwen’s Writing Gossip

My big September thing was a cousin’s wedding and family vacation tie-in, a hiking trip in Acadia National Park. I like the park more than I expected and still thinking about the fact they have an artist-in-residence program. I usually put something of my travels in my stories, and the thing that fascinated me the most was the old carriage road bridges. The views were stunning, but the idea of these old bridges from the 1920s being gateways….

The anthology I’m co-editing has an official title - Journey to Adventure. We’re trying to get the formatting done before Novel Quest gets going (because all of us will make that pivot and there goes time). We’re currently in the ‘let’s design a cover’ stage and it’s always so hard to do for an anthology. The stories are so unique - how do we have one that captures both a Mars scavenging mission and a couple escaping from a nursing home to elope? It’s so hard.

My extra critiques from The Adventure List have come back, and someone mentioned how the relationships felt so close and tight in the manner of LotR and that truly made me blush. That book is often held up as a standard of positive male friendship, so my beta gave me high praise. Compiling all the edits I’ve gotten and making changes will be my Novel Quest project, and I’m so excited to dive into that work.

I’m not anticipating it to take up the whole month, so I also have a backup project: writing something for a separate pen name I’ve not touched in a while. We’ll see if I get to that.