Wood!

At last, a reason to blow my horn. Nanobison has accepted my story "In the Shadow of the Dragon's Wing" for publication in their April issue.

UPDATE: It's now available for your reading pleasure.

Hoodyhoo!

I wrote the first draft of "In the Shadow of the Dragon's Wing" back in about 1993 or '94, I can't remember exactly when, sitting in a tiny apartment in Johnson City, TN, up all night, writing and smoking and writing and smoking. (I smoked back in the day when I was a mountain man.) I smoked a whole pack of cigarettes that night between 9 PM and about 4 AM, when I finally, as they say and quite literally, crawled into bed.

The first place I sent the story was Dragon magazine. This was the first story I'd ever sent to anybody, anywhere, that came back with a critique. Of course, it also came back with a rejection. But that critique kept me going, kept me writing, and eventually I published an adventure in Dungeon magazine, which led to writing for Dragonlance, and so on and so forth, forever and ever amen.

Still, I always kept that critique in the back of my mind, as I reworked the story and rewrote it, trying to solve its fundamental problems. In January of this year, I finally came up with the angle that I thought it needed. I rewrote it one more time, sent it out, got a rejection, sent it to another place, got another rejection, sent it to Nanobison and bang!

In all, I sent this story to seven different magazines before it was finally accepted for publication.
So the moral of the story is, this story finally weighs the same as a duck. Well, on Nanobison's scale, anyway.

Curiously, this story is yet another story of a series that I wrote before my first novel was published. The stories are all set in a fantasy world I called Korr. With the addition of "In the Shadow of the Dragon's Wing," that makes five of those stories that have been published. And the characters Morgrify and Whortleberry Pinchpocket from "The Great Gully Dwarf Climacteric of 40 SC" were originally characters in another story I wrote for the world of Korr. That leaves only one story from that series that hasn't been published somewhere.

I almost have a full series going here. Maybe someday they'll be collected in an anthology.

And monkeys might fly out my butt.