Today is an excellent day, and it was a long time coming.



Dan Wickett accepted my short story, "One Moment - 1330 South McLeod," for his anthology, VISITING HOURS AND OTHER STORIES, published with Press 53 .



I don't have a record of when I submitted this story to the anthology,
but I received word it passed the first round of cuts on April 6, 2005.




By then, the collection the story comes from (MISSING: A NOVEL IN
STORIES) had won a Phi Kappa Phi Honor award from USC, also known as
the first $$ I ever made for fiction.



Strangely, I don't have a record of the story's actual acceptance. It
must have come between 4/6/05 and 2/7/07, which is when Dan got the
word that Press 53 wanted to go forward with the anthology.



Since then I'd set the collection aside to concentrate on novels. I've
written thousands of pages, some pages getting further along the
publication process than others. Always there was this story.



This accepted story.



Because of this story I knew (with perseverance) that I could succeed at this often frustrating, often inexplicable business.



I've got a novel out to editors during a terrible economic depression, so you can see why I might need some validation. :)



So now it's January 28, 2009. I've got the proof in my hands.



It's a gorgeous anthology and the stories are varied and intriguing and
I am proud to have mine wedged among them. Some of the authors I know,
some I know of, and some I will discover for the first time when I read
this book cover to cover.



Now I need to get back to writing, and more importantly, to submitting.