So, yeah, that seems to be about the speed of things here these days... But, that's okay. Because there's news to share!
The big thing is that recently I sold my 100th short story! It was published just a few days ago: "Six or Seven Words Uttered by Marible Simpkins, While Unconscious After a Fall" at Wallstrait: A Literary Journal of Hard-to-Define Fiction. Something that this story shares with a whopping *twenty* of my other published stories is that it got its start at Liberty Hall. Among other things, Liberty Hall had a weekly Flash Fiction contest where you got two prompts and then had 90 minutes to write your story. Obviously, with that constraint, there were plenty of half-finished stories submitted and all of them were rough first drafts. But clearly it worked for me! According to my records, this one also looks to have been my last Liberty Hall story; which, if I recall correctly, means it was written for the last weekend flash fiction contest at Liberty Hall.
I had two other stories published earlier this year both in fantasy anthologies:
"A Drink from the Doubtless Sea" appeared in 99 Fleeting Fantasies. This one has one of my personal favorite last-lines from my stories. It also was the story that got me an entry in the Internet Science Fiction Database for the 14th consecutive year.
"The Gift of Music" appeared in A Little Fantasy Everywhere.
I also recently received an acceptance for a story of mine which had been submitted over fifty times before being accepted! More about that to come.
I've been spending a bit more time on writing recently; we'll see what that turns into as far as 2025 publications. After all, I need to get started on that second hundred...
