Published

It’s official: I now have one publishing credit.

It is a small step in the right direction, but it feels more like a giant leap to me. I keep looking around for an American flag to plant into the floor of our living room, something to mark this momentous and auspicious event. And there should be fanfare—I’ll round up the mariachis from Casa de Pico!

I wrote a story called “Hero for Hire” in July of ’09, spent a few weeks researching the writer's market for a magazine that might want to publish it, found an ezine called A Fly in Amber, and sent it to them without delay. They seemed to prefer an eclectic mix of genres, and they were open to stories of the more humorous persuasion.

Plenty of magazines out there accept sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and mainstream literary gems, but not too many go for full-on comedies. So I was grateful to find A Fly in Amber in the first place and overjoyed when they let me know in October that they’d be buying my story for their January issue.

And now, at long last, the latest issue of A Fly in Amber is available to the masses, and my story, “Hero for Hire” is listed sixth out of eight stories, wedged comfortably between “Foster Care” and “My Friend the Zombie.”

Of course, since writing is rewriting, I can always improve on anything I’ve done (including these blog posts, which usually go through at least three or four revisions before I release them into cyberspace). So I can’t help but cringe at how a few of the scenes were written, and there are some formatting errors—but everybody has to start somewhere, right?

Anyhow, this is my quest, and I’ll always remember my first published story.
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