Sheila Rambles

 When I graduated college with a Creative Writing degree, the first job I landed was working at a grocery store. There was a recession going on, and I hadn't been very good at accumulating useful experiences during my school days, so my resume was pretty much "I went to college! Yay?" As I recall, the uniform options were (a) a white buttondown shirt or (b) a dreary blue sweatshirt with the store logo on it. The dreary blue sweatshirt was more comfortable and most people wore it, including myself. One night, I wore the white shirt, because I'd been invited to a gathering of writerly types that I was going to immediately after work. One of my co-workers noticed, and asked me why I was wearing a white shirt. "I'm gonna go hang out with a bunch of writers," I told her. "You can write?" she asked. "Most literate people can ," I replied. And that's the thing of it. Most literate people can. People do it every day, even if it's just

 Well, well. It's been a while. "Is That What You Want" was rejected by Clarkesworld, rejected by Analog, rejected by The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and rejected by Apex Magazine. That really should be a longer list. I've written and submitted other stories and also have a nice collection of rejections for them as well. Except for one. In June of last year, just before my 51st birthday, I received an acceptance for a short story called "Home" for a shared-world anthology called The Forever Inn. It's coming out, as my dad would say, Real Soon Now. I've already been paid for it, in any event. I'll holler about it when it hits the streets. I skipped NaNoWriMo in 2020 (do you blame me?) but resumed it in 2021, taking on the rather ambitious project of rebooting the very first NaNovel I ever successfully completed. I worked out a detailed outline, broke it down into scenes written on notecards and lined up all over my floor, and then pro