Blowing Off the Dust
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