I won first prize!

I’ve just been notified that I have won first prize in Lucent Dreaming magazine’s first competition. It will be published online next month and in the magazine’s debut issue. It’s a story I like a lot and I’m thrilled it won.

It doesn’t happen often, and you can’t see, but I’m dancing 🙂 I’ll post the link when the story is available.

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Microfiction: The End

I saw this competition today, the Sully Award, and since I have any number of 200 word stories, thought I’d enter one of them. Not necessarily the best, but one I’m fond of. If you would like to enter, you have until next Tuesday. Just pop over to Heylookawriterfellow’s blog. The more the merrier.

They had run out of time. There were no more moons left, no more hope. Nothing more would rise in the sky, night or day. The standing stones watched but refused their help. The magic that lay beneath them slept. And it would sleep now forever. The sleepers would never waken, though this was surely the end, and they were the only ones who could avert it. So said the stories.

The fox watched the setting sun and called the vixen. Together they slipped through the gateway between the stones to the otherworld and left the earth to its dying.

Vixen stopped and looked back. Dog fox sat and wrapped his brush neatly over his toes. The sky beyond the stones was darkening though not with night; it was dark because the sky was empty. The pale sun had set and no moon would rise. The stars had all fallen and the universe turned its back on the earth. A flock of birds swung, swift, feathered darts, between the stones. An owl followed, another. They were the last. The stones fell together and shattered. The doorway had gone. Fox shook himself, vixen yawned, and they trotted into the starlit night.

Shortlisted!

I had a message this morning telling me that I was shortlisted in the Irish Imbas Books Celtic Anthology competition!

http://irishimbasbooks.com/a-long-shortlist-for-the-celtic-mythology-short-story-competition/

I’m thrilled to bits to get this far. This is the kind of story I love writing and it’s so gratifying to know that other people (competition judges, no less) have enjoyed reading it.

I’ll post when I hear who the winners are.