It’s the end  of June 2020. In the last year, I’ve written exactly five blog posts for this blog.

Five. One of those was in the last week so really, it barely counts.

Ok, so not exactly productive.

What happened?

Believe it or not, even though the posts on here have been few and far between, I’ve been very busy writing. However, it’s mostly been writing material not intended for this blog.

Some of the blog posts I have posted gives clues to what I’ve been working on. For example, the “Do you like creepy stories For Halloween” post. It highlighted a story I wrote for a Halloween anthology of horror. It was one of several projects I’ve worked on these last ten months, all on the fiction side of things.

First, there was the story with a bit of a romantic twist. In the September timeframe, I was asked if I’d be interested in writing a story about this girl that committed to going on 30 dates in 30 days. Each day would be written by a different author. All I had to do was tie it in with some basic information as well as pay attention to the stories before and after mine. It was fun. That story was published as part of the 31 Blind Dates Anthology in September. You can read my entry White, Purple + A Red Rose here but to get the full effect, you should really read all of the entries, starting with the first one here.

The anthology of horror was the second one. A bunch of the Paid Stories writers on Wattpad got together to write a series of short stories for the Halloween season. It was a fun experience and the project produced a bunch of fantastic creepy stories that still haunt me. I linked to my blog post above, but you can read the whole project here. My story, Blades and Blood, is the very first one.

Then, there was the zombie challenge. The zombie profile on Wattpad issued a challenge that just happened to fix exactly with a story idea that I’ve had in the back of my mind for quite a while. Although I usually don’t write zombie stories, I’ve always wanted to write one just to be able to say that I did. It was just the perfect moment to take one aspect of that story and write it. I found out a few weeks later that it was selected to be included in their zombie anthology. You can check out Hive Island here.

Fast-foward to spring. The Open Novella Contest (a contest to write a novella based on a series of prompts, about 20k words) is launched and incidentally, one of the prompts fit perfectly with the above zombie story fragment. It was an opportunity to write a full story and get the zombie business out of my system. I figured the least I could do was at least write the words required for the first round and see if I make it to the second round or not. I did. I also made it through to the third round. As I’m writing this, I just found out it also made it onto the long list as well as the short list. We’ll see if I can make it into the top five or not. Read Hive Island – The Awakening here.

Finally, one of my stories was selected for an official Wattpad Paid Stories anthology, around the theme “the one that got away.” You’ll see this one launch later in July.

Then, of course, I’ve been extremely busy with the Online Writing Log. I’ll go into more detail on this in another post but basically, when I’m not writing, I’m working on OWL.

As you can see, it’s been a very productive period but I do want to get back to regular posts here as well: looking at writing related apps, how they work with Linux, reviews of grammar software, sharing deals on relevant software etc. The stuff that can be useful to writers, but also a bit of random stuff here and there, like reviews of books, shows and maybe even the odd game.

My last post highlighting the Map Extravaganza at Humble Bundle kind of serves as that restart. I’ve got a few more coming up (my thoughts on Space Force on Netflix, for example) but then I’ll go back and look over some older posts and revise where updates may be needed. For example, some of the solutions related to software from years ago, are they still relevant? Can they be updated?

Anyway, expect Tall Tech Tales to come back alive with a variety of content before too long. I hope you stick around.