I'm happy to announce that a short story, Musta Susi (Black Wolf), co-authored by me and my wife, Ulla Susimetsä, received an honorary award yesterday evening. Combining our shared love for historical fiction and my passion for werewolf stories (my wife's written a couple of those before this as well, so she's not completely passionless), we wrote a story set in the 1640's, in the pirate-infested waters of the Caribbean and the New World colony of Sweden on the Delaware river.
I took part in a Christmas Drabble competition organised by The Cult of Me blog. I've never considered drabbles - stories of 100 words, no less, no more - my forte, but Christmas was a topic that drew me in to try what I could do. One of my drabbles, Memories, was chosen as one of the 12 Drabbles of Christmas, but I thought it might be a fun idea to share all my entries with you - especially since the winning entry is related to one of the focus areas of this blog and all of them could be seen as historical fiction.
Since I've been using this blog to review several werewolf-related novels and short stories, I hope the readers will excuse me for tooting my own horn when it comes to my very own werewolf short story. Last summer, I saw an advertisement about the biggest scifi and fantasy short story competition in Finland, one that was organised for the 29th time by Tampere Science Fiction Seura (~ Tampere Society of Science Fiction). I hesitated only for a moment before I started translating my unpublished werewolf story into Finnish in order to enter the competition.
This past month, The Cult of Me ran a short fiction competition with the theme of full moon on a night sky. This naturally evoked thoughts of werewolves and other night activities in my imagination and simply I had to send in an entry. I didn't win, but thought that I must share my rather silly story at least somewhere - this blog being the obvious victim.
The competition degrees that the stories must not exceed 500 words. I present to you here a slightly longer version. I hope you enjoy it at least a bit!