Through the Cooking Glass was a finalist for the Washington Science Fiction Association Small Press Award for Short Fiction. The story originally appeared in Raven Electrick, edited by Karen Romanko. The award will be presented at Capclave, which is the WSFA’s yearly convention.
I’m pleased and honored. 
I didn’t finish a story last week (week 3 of my “8 stories in 8 weeks” plan).
I’m okay with that. Maybe I’ll finish two this week, or maybe I won’t. I had some very good reasons for not finishing a new story last week.
What I’m most proud of is that I’m content. I’m not feeling like a failure. This is good progress for me on my new project, “Stop Beating Up My Inner Puppy.” In other words, I’m learning to be as kind to myself as I am to others, and I’m making progress here.
When I was in college, I took Russian. In third-semester, our instructor
decided that we’d try Russian Scrabble, just for fun.
Russian has 33 letters (compared to our 26) and an entirely different
distribution. So the tiles are given points based on their frequency. There
are 6 different “rare” tiles in Russian worth 10 points each, like our Q and Z,
and several more that are rare enough to be worth 8 points.
There were 8 of us in the class, and we split into 4 teams of 2. We drew
letters and prepared to play.
I should note: You don’t know Scrabble hell until you’ve got a rack holding a
“shch,” a “ya,” and an “ui.” (this is probably funnier if you hear it out
loud).
We all stared at our racks. For a very long time. Someone asked if we could
use a dictionary. He said sure.
Eventually, I won the game… by being the only person who could make any word
whatsoever. I made a three-letter word that meant “whose” (feminine gender).
(I did get the double-word value for starting on the center square.)
It took me twenty minutes to come up with it.
Oddly enough, we never tried Scrabble in class again.