Spring Anthology

Working on it. Delayed by birthdays (my son’s and mine), shovelling snow, keeping the heating system going, bringing an 18th century chimney back into use (with landlord’s help of course) and having my copy of OpenOffice now crashing every time I try to open a file. At least that’s free to reinstall. Most submissions come in Word but a few come in OpenOffice which is actually just as good. Almost, but not quite, entirely compatible.

It just doesn’t feel like Spring. It did for a few days, the daffodils even started coming up but they’re all flattened and frosted now. I don’t know how well they’ll survive. I’m just glad I didn’t start planting anything outside. Winter didn’t end, it just took a long weekend off.

Anyway, RooBeeDoo and I are working on edits. I hope to send them all out this weekend. Then contracts, payments, and finally publication.

I’m still stuck for a title. I’m thinking something spring-related because I’m running out of Coronaplague related ideas and this nonsense looks like it’s going on for a while yet. They can only sell vaccines under emergency authorisation. If the emergency ends, they can’t sell any more vaccines. So the emergency isn’t going to end.

Incidentally, emergency authorisation for experimental (yes, they are) vaccines only works if there is no effective treatment, hence the debunking of all effective treatments. Boris has said that we need to get a vaccine passport to prove we’re safe to be around in a crowd, yet on the same day he said two fully vaccinated people can’t meet indoors because the vaccines don’t guarantee protection. Apparently the ‘passport’ does. So why not skip the vaccines and just give us the passports?

Anyway. They aren’t giving up on this crap any time soon. So I need to get a title that maybe hints at the farce we’re living through but still leaves options open for at least the next three anthologies.

So far, options include ‘Dark Spring’, ‘The Cold Spring Stories’, ‘The Last Rites of Spring’, ‘The April Halloween’ (most of the stories are fairly dark this time, not too surprising under the circumstances) and any suggestions will be welcome.

I shouldn’t expect you to do it for free. Come up with a title Roobee and I hadn’t thought of and if we use it, you get a free print copy.

Okay. Back to work…