Week of: 6/27/26

Hooray! I got my first rejection from Writers of the Future since I've taken all this up again! There's a real sense of accomplishment in that, like the soreness after a workout. A physical reminder that you're a true participant, once more. Sure, it would have been nice to have won instead. Of course. But we're being realistic, here, and patient, and we will take what we can get.

I'm still working on stories. I've picked up a bad habit over the last several weeks (or longer) of starting one story only to interrupt myself by starting a different one. Soon, I'm going to have to go back and put paid to all of them, in something like a recursive loop (it also calls to mind a sequence in Gaiman's Sandman comics). But let's not bury the lede here: I continue to write. Everything else, finishing my stories, submitting them, selling them -- they're all further down the line.

The fundamental matter is to write.