I wanted to start out this week with some good news. My short story collection “In Love, In Water and Other Stories” has been accepted for publication by Post Mortem Press. Believe me, you will be hearing a lot more about this when it gets closer to the publication date next year. The funny thing about the acceptance was the timing. Last Tuesday, I received an email in the afternoon informing me of the winners of a contest/open reading period in which I had entered a mixed genre chapbook. I was not on the list. I am very used to rejections but I still felt a little depressed that my work didn’t make it. The fiction piece had been published already and the lyric essay had gotten much positive feedback. But, hey, that’s the writing life. A little after midnight that night, I received the email from Eric Beebe of Post Mortem Press informing me that my collection was going to be part of the 2014 catalog. I was giddy. My collection was going to be published! I found it a little hard to believe, a little too good to be true. And that too is the writing life.

On a different note, earlier today I saw that Science Fiction Grand Master Fred Pohl has died. You can read an obituary here. I met Pohl once, at the Science Fiction Research Association meeting in Oxford, OH in either 1989 or 1990. He seemed full of life and probably a lot of fun to know. Later, when I started teaching composition, I often used The Space Merchants as a text in class. It was a great book for them to read and write about. If you’ve never read it, find a copy and do so. I can’t say that Pohl was an influence on me as a writer, but there is no doubt of his influence on the field.