I found out last week that I’d sold my story “Eskhara” to JJA’s newest anthology, Federations, but I was waiting to see the final table of contents before posting anything. I was excited to see what big names he might have lured into the antho, and I wasn’t disappointed to find folks like Orson Scott Card, Lois McMaster Bujold, Harry Turtledove, Robert Silverberg, and Anne McCaffrey among them. My story was originally written in December 2005 (!) under the name “Souls Unbound” and my first readers liked the premise but not the execution: the protag was a goody-two shoes, the soldiers too villainous, the ending too melodramatic. I knew immediately they were right but I wasn’t sure what to change first.

Nothing like a narrow window to submit to a major anthology to get you motivated. After sitting on the hard drive for practically three years to the day, I opened up “Souls Unbound” to start cleaning. Turns out it was a tear-down job, leaving only the bare bones while the rest was rebuilt from scratch. It took longer than I hoped (when is that not the case in writing?) but I made the January 1 deadline and was pretty happy with the results. And JJA was too, apparently!

So I’m now batting one thousand in 2009: one story out, one story sold. Can’t beat that. (No, seriously, you can’t.) But I guess I’ll have to get off my duff and get something else out soon. 2008 was a fairly rotten year for my writing, and 2009 has been a fairly rotten year thus far for publishers, so a big sale to a publication I’m proud to be in fits the bill nicely. A good boost to the confidence as well.

Current Mood: Very Pleased |