Sometimes thunderbolts, the kind that come out of a clear blue sky, are nice, and the grievous effects of electrocution - of one’s fortune! - are very pleasant, even lucrative, and the flaking skin - of happiness! - is - I give up. [Metaphor aborted.]

So, a year ago, I sent “The Vicksburg Dead” to Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. It was a good story, and I thought it deserved more exposure than it got in its initial printing (and no slight to that initial printing, which was well edited and well published, but it was an indie anthology, and those can only be so successful). This was one of my favorite stories I’ve ever written, and I wanted more people to see it. So I sent it to IGMS as a reprint, and - a year later - it was accepted. It had been so long that I didn’t even know what the email was talking about until a few sentences in. A thunderbolt.

It’s my first pro sale - six cents a word, and a large readership. Two more and I can join the SFWA. And this one sale, one hopes, will wedge agents’ doors open just a leetle further when I write to them about my beautiful novels that only need an audience in order to burst into luminous sun-shattering literary rockets.

Phhffew. Now I need to come down a little bit. I’ll just contemplate for a while how a shrinking readership and rising printing and distribution costs make it virtually impossible to make a living as a novelist in this day and age. Ha! Ha!

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