I'M GOING GLOBAL!

   My ten-minute play, Playing with Knives, has been chosen for the Short+Sweet Festival in Sydney, Australia! They get 1500 submissions a year, and I've submitted to them before, so I feel very honored to have been included this time around. 

BAD NEWS

  There are no guarantees in the World of Publishing. Not even after you've inked a contract (legally binding in most professions, but in the writing world, anything goes). After carefully (and proudly, I might add) negotiating my publishing contract with Tricycle Press/Random House, I signed it and sent it back with all the appropriate tax forms. That was on a Friday. On Monday, I received a phone call from my editor telling me that Random House had decided to shutter Tricycle Press. It was a big shock for everyone. Didn't they just move to new larger offices back in the Spring? Didn't they have an Open House a month ago? The editors received the news a week before they sadly informed their authors. At the end of January 2011, they'll no longer have a job, and Tricycle Press, publisher of beautiful, eclectic children's books for 18 years, will no longer exist. The writers whose books are coming out in Spring 2011 would still see their books in print. Everyone else was a BIG question mark. All the editors were to submit a package detailing the merits of the books they were handling for Random House's consideration. In the end, out of 36 or so books slated for publication through fall 2011, 2012 and 2013, only 2 or 3 were retained by Random House Children's Books.
   Goldy Luck and the Three Chans was not one of them. So, after three and a half years, three editors, and the excitement of an offer of publication, it's back to square one.