Month: November 2024

Who is this guy on my left? Carl, a total stranger that bought my dinner! And not just any dinner, but dinner and wine at the finest restaurant and winery at Lake Chelan, Washington. Let me tell you the story!

I went to Lake Chelan to work in solitude on my novel based on my Writers of the Future short story winner. I do my own cooking to keep expenses down, but it was my final night and I wanted one last taste of the Chelan vibe, and that meant visiting a special winery, Tsillan Cellars.

As I sat by their tasting room’s fireplace sipping their 2021 Petite Sirah–the 2024 Pacific Northwest Wine Competition’s Best in Show winner and the richest Sirah I’ve ever tasted–I checked on my Wulf Pack Writers group. You see, results were coming in on that quarter’s Writers and Illustrators of the Future Contest, the largest talent search for speculative fiction writers in the world, and the bulk of my writers had entered stories.

Each quarter, only eight finalists are chosen out of thousands of entries from around the world. From those eight finalists, three winners for the quarter are chosen. The winners’ stories get published in a bestselling international anthology, and the writers get their expenses paid to fly to Hollywood for a workshop and a gala that rivals the Oscars. It’s considered the highest honor for an emerging speculative fiction writer.

We had a finalist! And then another announced! And another! Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, a last Wulf Pack Writers member posted that they were not only a finalist, they had won! I was giddy, and it wasn’t just because of the delicious Sirah! ONE HALF of this international contest’s finalists were from the writing group I coach. These writers joined my group with no sales to their names and they followed my instruction and did the work and now four of them stood at the peak of this contest known for discovering future bestselling authors!

It’s not the first time we’ve had stellar results. Well over a dozen writers from my Super Secrets of Writing Workshop have won this contest and more since I launched the program six years ago. But to my knowledge, no other writing group has comprised half of a quarter’s finalists before, including a winner. This was such a huge accomplishment for my group I decided to celebrate right there by having dinner in the winery’s famous restaurant, Sorrento’s Ristorante.

This was a big splurge for me. It’s a fine dining place, and I had to choose between getting a nice bottle of their wine to take home or using that money to offset the price of dinner. I chose dinner and enjoyed a perfectly crafted dish of cannelloni in pink sauce beside another radiant fireplace in their dining room. And, instead of a taste of their Best in the Pacific Northwest Sirah, I bought a glass and enjoyed a perfect finale dinner to my writing retreat.

But it wasn’t over. The waiter leaned over at the end of my meal and said, “Your meal has been paid for, sir. Everything has been covered.” Shocked, I looked around the packed restaurant.

“By whom? And why?”

He nodded to a far table. “Carl over there. He’s a regular. He and his wife like doing this for strangers.”

Wow. It wasn’t like I had been seated next to them and that we had chatted for a bit. They were at the other end of the dining area (see the dining room picture I pulled from the web–it was that packed out on a Thursday).

I waited until they had finished eating and walked over to thank them. Carl smiled and said he enjoyed doing kindnesses like this, that it was his way of paying it forward. He said I could pay it forward one day to someone else. I grinned and said he’d be happy to know I’d been doing that and told him about the workshop I ran for free for five years before I finally had to charge for my time, and the results my writers had just experienced hours before while I was doing the tasting in the winery.

Carl was thrilled and told me he loved science fiction. He took my card and said he’d buy Writers of the Future Vol. 35 and read my story. His wife asked about the novel I had been working on in Chelan and got super excited as I described it to her. She finally told me she’s Tsillan’s gift shop manager and that they’ve never had a book signing at the winery before and she’d Iike me to be their first! More cards exchanged.

What a miraculous pay it forward upon pay it forward day! I went back to my table, finished the last of my wine, and stared into the warm fire, glowing bright within.

Some days on this earth are pure magic.