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Hey, I sold a story! "A Lake of Spaces" to Weird Tales.

I've been submitting to WT since I was fourteen years old -- I think the first thing I ever sent them was a painfully bad story about zombie retirees called "Henry's Diner of the Dead", which garnered me no reply except a copy of their famously long guidelines, with several crucial sections marked in yellow hi-liter. I did sell them a poem back in 2001, but I never got a story past the old regime. Fortunately, Ann VanderMeer is more receptive to things like stories about foulmouthed slackers with superpowers... (Though I should note that she rightly rejected some of my teenage crap stories that I sent to The Silver Web.)

This is the second "challenge" story I've sold; Heather gave me a series of prompts last year when I was feeling stuck, with the agreement that if I sold any of the stories that resulted, I'd give her half the money. The first story was "Artifice and Intelligence", where the challenge was to write a story in six scenes that involved three AIs. The challenge for "A Lake of Spaces" was to write a story in present tense that takes place underwater. Every prompt had a content element and a formal element. I'd still like to write the one where she challenged me to create a story in future tense that involves a robot; I actually figured out a way to make the weird tense necessary. Just haven't had time to put it on the page yet... Maybe once Not Grift Sense is done.

Speaking of, between my lunch break and some pre-bed scribblings, I got another 2300 words of the novel down yesterday. (Previously I was lucky to get 500 words a day.) This book really, really wants to get out of my head and onto the page, so I think I mostly just have to stay out of my own way and let it come.