Today started in the best way possible: I found out that my short story "Behind the Rules" (originally published in Forgotten Worlds) has sold to Escape Pod! There are so many things about this that make me happy. I love getting my stories podcast in general - I can't think of a cooler experience for an author than to hear your story read out loud (and, best of all, read out loud well, as they always are at Escape Pod!) - so that would have made me happy anyway. And since we're in the middle of a really financially tight month, it's great timing to sell a story to a market that always pays promptly and well. But most of all, I'm just so glad that this story is getting a good reprint. It was the first science fiction story I ever got published, and one of the first SF stories I ever wrote. (SF/fantasy may be lumped together in bookstores and workshops, but I've always been overwhelmingly a fantasy author). But it was also one of the few stories that's come to me in an intense, quick burst of inspiration and passion, and not only because it was, as I pointed out in my original journal entry about it, "my final, snarky & long-overdue reaction, after years & years of furious simmering, to Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider's The Rules, which reduced me to mute outrage when it first appeared".

"Behind the Rules" is going to be podcast sometime within the next several weeks, and I can't wait.

In the meantime, I spent this morning revising, as usual, and now we're off to Borders so that Patrick can read more of my chapters and I can drink a Signature hot chocolate to celebrate the sale. :)

Happy Sunday, everybody!