Photo by Amy Tharp.

Hey! January Nineteenth is Edgar Allan Poe’s Birthday! Perfect time for a Progress Report!

I’d spent a few months last year working on stories for anthologies on deadlines (and sold at least one!) So I took a kind of writing breather for the last weeks of the year.

For the New Year I decided to finish some of the stories that are incomplete in my files and get them ready to send off. I actually did pretty well on that, a lot of the time doing it on my laptop down at the Wichita Public Library. (I like the atmosphere!)

So, I finished a funny story (about birds) that I set in Mom & Dad’s old backyard and sent it off to the Saturday Evening Post.

I typed-up and edited a sci-fi Christmas story that may be saved on my old computer but I found the original handwritten draft in a notebook.

I finished another story for “RoMMantic Reads” that I started about a year or so ago. Lots of changes since then. About all I had to do was to add a paragraph or two joining a couple of sections.

I wrote up some of the Friday Flash Fics stories and did the Flash Fiction Draw Challenge story for January.

I may be leaving a story out that I can’t recall, but that’s pretty good even if I didn’t start anything new.

I worked on two Queer Sci Fi columns. The one for January, where I had to go online and check name spellings because my handwriting was so bad! The other for a few months from now, which was already partly written. I have about three other columns finished so that fixes that up through May (unless something big comes up!)

All of this makes me feel good, and I need that!

And I’ve kept up on the reading and doing the monthly “Reading Report.”

That’s about it for now!

——jeff baker, Wichita, Kansas

at the Wichita Public Library

January 18, 2024