Casey Update (including stories! and play!) & VCon 37

Not a lot to report. Cancer apparently gone, site slowly healing, and I am back into life full tilt. Perhaps a little too fully tilted. But so much attracts me! There's a three day retreat this week with monks and nuns from Plum Village. It is focussed on healing, which seems not a bad topic for me. I look forward to it. I am also busy critiquing a pile of stories for VCon, preparing for our play, taking classes at Inspire Health, etc...

I started a wonderful class on Roman Britain at SFU Continuing Ed. That lit a candle under me to get out Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars and reread various papers on Celtic studies that I have in my files. I'm starting to lead my sangha every few weeks, am active at yoga again, and then there are all those nieces and nephews... And yet!

In the midst of it all I managed to get two new stories into circulation (and one older one that I had let drift). So out there in the mail system is a Scottish ghost story ("In Days and Nights The World Is Spent"), an allegory concerning cannibalism ("Eating Our Young"), and a story about David Bowie's mum ("Mother of the Star").

I'm also gearing up for the new session at the Kyle writer's group, which starts next week. Last year, when I was able to go, I used that time for polishing a collection of poems I have written, and I will be doing that again this year, so likely I won't be doing much more story writing this year.

Not to be forgotten, the last weekend of this month is VCon 37, which I'll be attending with my nephew Theo Campbell. The Pallahaxi Players Readers Theatre is putting on our second show, "And Then Some" by Matthew Hughes. Matt's work appears regularly in Fantasy & Science Fiction, and he is the author of The Damned Busters, Tales of Henghis Hapthorn, and The Other.

This story will be in an upcoming issue of Asimov Magazine, but we get a sneak preview at VCon. Besides being general dogs-body for the performance, I get to play, er, the sound effects... Be there or be square, my friends.

Casey