Tag: mother’s day

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by Sandra Grills

“Mama, I need a hug” a small voice calls into the darkness. She believes, even at the age of eight, that her little voice will be heard. She trusts that someone will be there. Not just any someone, her Mama, ready to give her a hug.

With a sigh only perceptible in my sleep weary mind, I roll over and push myself out of bed. My eyes open just a crack as I shuffle down the hall. She’s sleeping when I reach her room—a little cherub running around in the land of nod—but experience warns against leaving. It would only result in a louder, more urgent call. I reach down and do what many would consider an unthinkable sin, I wake a sleeping child.

Delicate eyelids flutter open, and a smile cracks the flawless face with a look that says “I knew you’d come.” Heavy arms reach up and claim their hug. The smile continues, even after the arms drift back onto the bed, and the eyes slide closed.

Sleeping
Mark Probst via Creative Commons

I tiptoe past the creaks in the floor, careful to lay my feet on soft carpet, before I lay a weary head back on my pillow. A little noise floats up the hallway. The contented sigh of a sleeping child who feels safe.

 

 

Sandra GrillsSandra has been a director, a business owner, a project manager, a bookbinder, and a mother. Her current passion is reading and writing in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where she lives with her husband, two amazing children, and a gecko named Captain Doug.

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Double rainbow house
Pete Seapaddler via Creative Commons

As I write this, my little ezine/blog content experiment is rolling halfway into its fourth month. In all honesty, it’s going a lot better than I thought it would, and I was pretty optimistic about it. I’ve received a ton of truly phenomenal microfiction submissions, found audiences and support from some completely unexpected places, and discovered I have something of a passion for editorial work.

But after a quarter of my trial-by-fire year, I started examining things at a higher level than just “read this next submission! layout the next issue! format this accepted story for posting!” What was working, what I wished I’d done differently early on, how things looked financially, whether the schedules and formats I’d established were sound, basically evaluating everything from top to bottom.

The first result of this was a minor re-design of the aesthetic elements. It was something I’d planned to do starting in Volume 2 but I realized I didn’t want to wait. I also made Nikki the Managing Editor, really just formalizing the work she was already doing behind the scenes. Guidelines were set for guest editor spots; plans set into motion for the Volume 1 edition which will collect all stories from Issues 1 through 6; contingencies were established for the budget; realities for the social media presence were addressed.

But the biggest and most glaring source of contention from this examination was the way the stories were being rolled out. Friday posts felt like they were being lost in the shuffle of weekend plans (partially confirmed by the traffic numbers and the relative responses to “in case you missed it” reminders the following week). But moreover the monthly issues with only four short shorts felt like they weren’t being given sufficient treatment in the ezine. In fact with two 600-word editorials per issue (one from me and one from the guest editor), the ratio of story content to meta or editorial text was 2:3. For a fiction publication, that seemed a little funny.

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