I got some good news last week: Trevor Quachri, the editor of the venerable Analog magazine, has decided to pick up my story “Proteus.” I’m not sure when it will be coming out, but it’s been wonderful to have a little run of acceptances after such a long dry spell of rejections last year. I’ll keep you posted when “Proteus” is due to come out, as well as when my story “Count Eszterhazy’s Harmonium” will appear in Kaleidotrope.

“Proteus” will be the 15th story I’ve published. In other words, I’ve published 1.66667 stories per year since I started writing science fiction in 2007. What seems like kind of a paltry rate of publication will still, eventually, yield a decent sized harvest of stories. If I’ve learned nothing else from writing, I’ve learned to be patient.

In other publication-related news, Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection is on the shelves now, as is Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition. My story “The Daughters of John Demetrius” shows up in both of them. It was a wonderful experience to stumble across the Dozois anthology on the “What’s Hot” shelf at Powell’s City of Books last week. Going to Powell’s is often a bit depressing for me: I often come away feeling overwhelmed by how many great books are out there, that feeling that there are way more good books to read than there are days in life to read them. Other times I go in and feel like I don’t amount to much as a writer as I stroll among the towers of great authors and literary hucksters and folks who just got lucky in the publishing game. It was a sweet moment to see that I too get lucky once in a while.

The author in his natural habitat. Photo by the lovely  Carlyn Eames.