Write a Duck, Duck, Duck -- I'm On Fire!

My dreams: Shattered like a beaver dam hit by a maple syrup truck.

Luckily, only metaphorically on fire! But I just found out on Monday that I'm going to have another publication. And, okay, so it's really small and it's my first publication since January, so maybe I'm just smouldering. But considering I never expected this sale in the first place, it's still pretty darn cool. Or freezing, really, but I'll get to that.

See, back in 2000 when they were still the (piping) hottest books in the Self Help section, I tried to have a story published in the then-upcoming Chicken Soup for the Canadian Soul. I wrote a true story about helping my mom rescue a pair of ducks who'd nearly gotten themselves frozen into the ice of our pond. Apparently the editors liked the story, but it didn't make it past their test audience (yes, CSftS has test audiences, like movies).

Apparently, the test audiences didn't think the story was 'Canadian Enough'. (But it was about ducks! In Ontario! In Winter! How could that not be Canadian?)

It's like mounties and back bacon. Seriously.

But it wasn't to be, so I moved on to something else and forgot about the story for nearly 14 years. At some point I even erased it from my hard drive.

And then on my birthday, I was contacted by the same editor. The CSftS people had started putting out books again, and she wanted my permission to submit the duck story--which she'd kept for over a decade--for Chicken Soup for the Soul: O Canada! The Wonders of Winter.

I scraped my jaw off the floor and told her yes, of course, and not quite two months later it made the final cut.

On the same day I got that very pleasant email, I read at The Mary Sue that apparently there will be a 'Chicken Soup for the Soul' movie. Because obviously Battleship wasn't sufficiently heart-warming.

So naturally--naturally!--this made me wonder what a CSftS movie about my duck story would be like. And Photoshop and I came up with some doubtlessly Oscar-worthy possibilities:

( The obvious first choice of Sci-Fi/Horror; )

( a thriller; )

( and of course, the heartwarming, seasonal family movie. )

(And these are totally going in the 'Mutation' square of my hc_bingo card).

Quack!