So, this issue of Asimov’s isn’t on the stands yet, I’m guessing, but you can get it on your kindle here.  You can also buy it from Magzter. If you haven’t read Asimov’s, or haven’t read it lately, I suggest you do a free trial.

Read my novella, “What We Hold Onto,” —and the rest of the issue, because Asimov’s stories rock. The Editor, Sheila Williams, has won the Hugo award twice, and is up for it again this year. She deserves to win.

She changed my life, a few years back she bought a few of my stories, and her unwavering support has made all the difference. I write now knowing that I’ve got a decent shot at publication, if I give it my all.

I’m in a different place now, than I have ever been.

I’ve had a bunch of wonderful editors buy my work over the years; Charlie Ryan, Warren Lapine, Ed McFadden, Patrick Swensen, and lately, Gordon Van Gelder, C.c Finlay, and Michael Resnick. But something happened, a few years ago, and I think, maybe, I’ve gotten better at this.

I’m desperately trying to be in this moment and realize, I’m here; I’m being waved in for a landing.

If I want to write novels, theres a chance one might sell.

If you’re lucky in life, you set out to do something hard, that not a ton of people achieve, and you work hard, and you do it. And it feels good. Maybe it takes a year. Maybe it takes five.

Maybe it takes twenty. But you get there.

And you work hard along the way and you make friends. And you help them get there, too, because even though they’re your competition, in one sense, they’re also the only people, who know what it is, to do this thing.

So maybe you find out eventually that the thing you always wanted to do is a thing you can do.

If you never give up.

Never give up.

Never.

Ever.

Give.

Up.

You’ll watch people ten, twenty, thirty years younger, hit your milestone, and you’ll be happy for them, and you’ll try not to be angry at yourself, for giving up, for so long, for not trying harder, for giving in to despair. Oh! So much despair.

For letting go of the dream for five or ten years at a time…

But now is a time for celebration and forgiveness for Not Living Up to One’s Potential. I know time is no longer on my side. Men my age keel over and people kinda shrug; as Louis CK said, there are no candle-light vigils for people dying in their 50s. So I have to get cracking. And I am. I am.

Anyway, I’ll be posting about this issue a crap load of times. This is just the first post. This is the longest piece I’ve sold; the longest piece I’ve written.

I hope you like it. I worked as hard as I know how to on it.

It was also effortless.

The way something you love is effortless, even when it’s more work than you ever imagined.

Excelsior!

A few days back I received emailed galleys for my upcoming novella, What we Hold Onto, which should appear in the late spring, in the June issue of Asimov’s.

Again, I experience a weird mixture of triumph and terror. Gut wrenching fear.

What if people hate it?

The POV character is female, a middle aged woman. What if they say she doesn’t feel female?

I’ve made up a new human culture. What if people say it’s total bullshit? I use the made-up culture to explore some ideas in and around race. What if people say I’m whitesplaining, mansplaining?

Even worse, what if people think it’s boring?

What if it makes people cancel their subscriptions and I never sell another story?

Everything I’m proud of in the twenty three thousand word thing, every revelation, every thing that came alive on the page as I wrote it now looks like a dissected frog in the galley. Yup. Those are the organs. That’s a heart. That’s a stomach. That’s a, a… liver, I think. Uh huh. That’s a frog all right. I think.

I’ve been through his ten times now, in the big magazines.

Some part of me will love this thing again, in the future, I know. But not now.

And as I anticipate failure, some part of me wonders, what if it was nominated for an award and I felt like I’d finally, once and for all, arrived? What if I felt perfectly welcomed and accepted and loved by all of science fiction? What if my Clarion instructors read it, and sent me notes, on a job well done?

What if it got me a thousand twitter followers?

What if it made attractive people want to be my friend?

Would that change the nature of the blank page in front of me when I write? Would that blank page feel any better?

Would that page beckon any more brightly?

Knowing what I know, about myself, having got this far, what do I think, really?

That’s right.

I hear a voice which says, soothing, ‘just do your work, just do your work, just do your work.’

This is as good as it gets. It doesn’t have to get better.

Be content. Get back in the saddle.

And ride.

So I got this tweet…

and I thought, hey, that’s way cool.

I’m not a big podcast person, and so, like an idiot, I wasn’t aware of the stature of the folks whose stories are in this thing, so I thought, hey, I’m in this thing, this will be nice.

I get now that I have been invited to submit, submissions are by invite only, so, I did.

There’s stuff here by golden age masters I read in my teens and the hottest up-and-comers like Ken Liu, so, anyway. it’s cool to be considered, regardless of what happens.

I sent the requested story, and a few more as well, so, we’ll see what happens.

Very exciting though.

I’m trying to move this blog away from astonished-at-my-own-small-success postings, self-deprecating humor, to something with more universal appeal. I have a small blog readership. I’d reach more people with a bullhorn in Harvard Square.

One recurring theme which I think is uplifting is the idea of the second act, the second chance. It’s pretty bloody reassuring for those of us in our fifties and I imagine, if one was in one’s twenties, it would also be reassuring. You can shit the bed for decades! And still end up somewhere!

What’s more, the nitty gritty reality of the writing life has never been more on display. Simply follow and friend your favorite authors and you’ll be exposed to the process in a way that, even a decade ago, was unheard of.

Follow and friend the people you publish with in the magazines, your editors; google your reviews…

…Ok, lost a half hour there. Sorry. I’m back. Even ambivalent reviews of my work give me chills. People are reading me!

Authors tweet, blow by blow, their struggles with manuscripts; word counts, revisions, the dark, bleak moments of hopelessness which seem to be a part the process, and the heady joys of completion and success–and publication, and, on occasion, acclaim.

And so, I’ll say now, casually, that I’ve sold my second story to F&SF, a story titled Things Worth Knowing, and that I have galleys in hand; if they’re from the same editor who worked on my first F&SF story I know there will be a bunch of really smart changes in the PDF.

It’s  a delight, to have someone work on your text, make it better, as it goes out the door. Every now and then you’ll disagree, you’re making some point the the editor didn’t get, but nine times out of ten, you smack your forehead and say “great googly moogly, how did that get by me?”

I’ll also mention, oh so casually, the possibility of being included in a very cool anthology, which I’ll know about for sure in a month or so.

Mostly, I’m here to tell you, I’m out in the world pounding on my aging Macbook Air with the flickery screen, lugging my backpack full of books, drinking coffee in Cambridge Massachusetts, surrounded by people younger and hipper and more beautiful than I am, to be sure, but I’m here. I’m writing. People are reading what I write.

Life is good.

Take a stab at whatever it is you really want to do. Humiliate yourself at an open microphone, get your stories and poems rejected, write a goddamn screenplay, fiddle with a useless agent for a decade, paint a picture, write a song, make bad art, make good art, and play nicely with others while you do. Keep your heart open, keep your head in the game.

You never know where you might end up, in twenty years or so.

So I’ve had an amazing streak over the last few years, selling a bunch of shorts and a novella to Asimov’s, a magazine I’ve been wanting to be in for twenty years, as well as a sale to F&SF, Interzone, and other markets, but truth be told the streak started with my sale to Warren Lapine’s 2012 Fantastic Stories anthology.

My first sale in almost twenty years.

I was delighted to find myself in an anthology with the likes of Harlan Ellison, Mike Resnick, Barry Longyear, and a bunch of other writers I recognized from Year’s Best Anthologies over the years. That publication got me on my feet again.

After selling him the story, Warren approached me with the notion of doing something on the web with him, genre-book wise. He’d published Realms of Fantasy for a year or so towards the end of its run, and I’d done a website and eventually the page layout and cover / interior design for the magazine.

I turned him down at first, wanting to focus on the writing, unsure if I really wanted to be involved with web design and development anymore. My consulting experiences in independent publishing finally pushed me over the edge, and I agreed to help him with the new Fantastic Stories Magazine / Book site.

This time around we have new models for how web-based genre fiction is done. Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, and dozens of kickstarter financed anthologies have blazed new trails in the genre, garnering a good chunk of the Hugo and Nebula awards over the last few years. The days when all validation for a short genre author was intrinsically bound to paper have passed.

Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF, soldier on with great stories by great authors, both new and established; the Years Best anthologies are still a vital part of the genre as well, but one can feel the center slowly shifting. Online is coming on strong. Newstand distribution becomes ever more problematical.

Short fiction is a strange thing; in a world of on-demand video and super-fat, endless novel series, it seems odd that it continues to exist in any form whatsoever. In the end, I’m glad people still want to read it; paper or ebook, traditionally published or indy-pubbed, there’s a huge world of readers out there, dozens of marketplaces, thousands of new voices. How will we make sense of it all? How do we separate the wheat from the chaff? I’m no editor, thankfully. That’s not my job.

I’m a writer, again, enjoying every minute of it, and it’s my goal to reach readers, and to make money doing so, so I can do it with all of my time, By Any Means Necessary. Which brings us to the point of this post, this anthology of my first three Asimov’s stories and my career reviving Fantastic Stories 2012 sale, which I’m selling at Fantastic Stories. (My novella, Of All Possible Worlds is not part of this antho, as it is still on the stands here and there, where the magazine was distributed.)

Four Worlds is on sale at Amazon under my own name, and feel free to buy it from them for your Kindle or Kindle Reader Ap on your smartphone, iPad, or Android device. But the links here are to the same file at Fantastic.

Here’s how that works.

Pay with a credit card or Pay Pal, and you’ll be emailed a download link, good for a day.

Download the zipped archive with both the .mobi (kindle) and .epub (everything else) file.

Email that file to your device, or drag it over a cable, and there you go; you’ve just supported an independent on-line bookstore, and you’ve given me a higher royalty rate than Amazon, at the same time.

What’s the catch? Well, if you’ve never bought an independent book or moved one of your own documents onto your ereader, it will take you a few minutes to figure out how to do this. Every device manufacturer wants to keep you in their walled garden, their market vertical, but, every device supports reading indy books and personal documents, too. It takes five minutes the first time, though. They figure that’s enough to prevent most people from ever even trying to buy from anyone else.

Prove them wrong. Support local booksellers; support authors; support magazines; support indy on-line marketplaces.

My cheerfully exasperated support document which points to how to read indy books on a variety of devices can be read here.

And read my stories, even if you couldn’t find them on stands!

After qualifying her comments by saying that ‘none of the stories enthused her greatly,’ Lois Tilton at Locus goes on to say many nice things about my cover story novella in the August 2o14 issue of Asimovs.

This one is a nostalgic fannish delight, revisiting the sensawunda of the goldenAstounding age with Orgone boxes, Dean Drives, and John W Campbell, a personal friend/rival of Galen’s. The plot is a full-stuffed sausage, bursting its casing with skiffy references, alternate timelines, aliens, and red-herring gizmos.

The Tangent review by Clancy Weeks was also gratifying:

 “Of All Possible Worlds,” covers a lot of ground, selecting ingredients from several genres and mixing them in a perfect recipe of alternate worlds. Several times I was sure of the eventual outcome, only to find myself at square one again with no clue as to the possible resolution. To me, that’s the sign of a ripping good yarn.

The story consumed me for months; Sheila Williams at Asimov’s suggested the ending wasn’t quite right, confirming the verdict of all three of my writing workshops so I took another crack at it and the end result was, I think, better.

I will be releasing an expanded edition as an ebook with both endings in a few months, I think; the original ending, about a short stories worth of content, has a lot of stuff in it, and there’s an extra scene that I have wanted to write for awhile now.

I’ve gotten three or four nice notes on this blog about the story as well.

If you read and liked the piece, please feel free to head over to Goodreads and give it a rating and a short review. Anything to displace the one line written by the one guy there with the super grumpy looking avatar.