There’s a fairly old video game, Red Dead Redemption, and it has a beautiful theme song… The lyrics are beautiful, but this bit in particular always resonated with me:

“And all the storms you’ve been chasin’
About to rain down tonight.”

The sum total of long-term plans, all coming to fruition at the same time. This week has been like that for my writing endeavours.

First, the Pulp Asylum magazine bought my short story “Murder of the Orient Express” (of, not on). After that, Story Unlikely bought the reprint rights to my very first sold story, “How to Prepare for Time Travelers in the Workplace.” And last but not least, I’ve sold my first-ever non-fiction work! My essay “The Hierarchy of Apocalypses” will appear in an upcoming issue of Phano. It’s about my video game escapism during the pandemic, and the many, many ways we as a society have chosen to outsource our humanity to machines. I’ve written quite a few non-fiction Kindle books before, but this is the first actual non-fiction essay sale. Hopefully, the first of many!

Also, I’ve finished yet another short film! That particular project is still top-secret, but it is – for once – not sci-fi, and it deals with a quixotic astronaut. Gonna add a few finishing touches and then try my luck submitting it to some A-list festivals. (The odds may be against me, but I have infinite time and optimism.)

Needless to say, this week has been one long series of celebrations. It’s a good thing I’m trying to gain as much weight as possible for my upcoming Continental Divide Trail adventure. (I fly out in just 17 days, wooo!) And on top of that, I have a very very enthusiastic agent reading my new novel (“The Patron Saint of Unforgivable Mistakes”), and a few more stories submitted to anthologies – which have not yet been rejected on sight. (That’s always a good sign!)

I can’t quite describe how great this feels: after months of rejections, receiving three acceptance emails (and on the same week!) is an unbelievable dopamine boost.

I track all my story submissions (and rejections) in a plain old text file – that’s fast and easy. At this point, I’m starting to run low on the unsold stories, which is an excellent problem to have! I’m currently reading the wonderful “Creating Short Fiction” by Damon Knight – reading it slowly, because (unlike so many writing guides…), it’s choke-full of advice and food for thought. The goal is to read it and internalize its lessons (or most of them, anyway) before my big CDT hike. I won’t have a lot of free time on my adventure, but I’ll have some – and I’ll have many many hours of nothing but hiking, and thinking, and brainstorming. This isn’t one of my primary goals for the hike (and not even in the top-5), but I suspect I’ll finish it with quite a few new short stories and poems. We’ll see, eh.

Here is to more acceptance letters from editors!