To keep myself from losing track of:
all the contests I've entered,
all the contests I've volunteered myself as a judge (or let myself be voluntold into judging),
all the books I've had to read as a contestant or as a judge,
all the deadlines,
a...
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I had to tag ten people as my payment for this contest. Oof. That's an unusually steep payment, and it has me wondering what my payment to my assigned judges will involve.
On the other hand, it's not common that a contest has a nonfiction category...
YES! I CAN FEED SOME POOR, UNFORTUNATE JUDGE MY LITERARY BROCCOLI! MWAH HAH HA HA HA HA!
The Broccoli Book is entered in Nonfiction. I hope the judge is okay with reading literary criticism. Actual literary criticism, not book reviews. Have I ever mentioned that I got defenestrated out of the ivory tower mere weeks before doing my written and viva voce exams at Oxford? I had glandular fever, aka Epstein-Barr virus, aka mononucleosis. So much for that M.Phil degree. Then again, I hadn't been able to find anyone who was willing to supervise my proposed thesis on the role of alchemy in the literature of the late English Renaissance, so I was still looking at the end of my academic career there, anyway.
And all of my academic friends are adjunct faculty with no job security and earnings that amount to about $12/hr, so I think I might have dodged a bullet, anyway.
I'm rambling.
Morsels: Tales of Love and Passion is entered into Short Stories.
Ancilla is entered into LGBTQIAPK+. Well, technically it's entered into LGBTQ+, but you know me and my fondness for alphabet soup.
L - Lesbian
G - Gay
B - Bisexual, like Ancilla (and like "ancilla")
T - Transgender, like me
Q - Queer, like me, or Questioning, definitely not me
I - Intersex (fun fact: there are statistically as many intersex people as there are natural redheads - it's a lot more common than people think, in part because it's still very common for babies with ambiguous external genitalia to be "corrected" soon after birth, and their birth certificates amended accordingly. The most common ways to be intersex involve chromosomes and internal organs, though).
A - Asexual, and/or Aromantic. Some people use the A to imply the ace spectrum, some people use it to denote a person who is strictly ace/aro, in which case, the D in my alphabet soup, which denotes both Demisexual and Dominant, is covered under +. ("Magister" is also a double D).
P - Polyamorous, or Pansexual (I'm both. "ancilla" is polyam).
K - Kinked. Like yours truly. And like the characters in Ancilla!
+ - Anything that isn't covered by all these letters already.
