My new favorite person in the world wrote a great review (or would it be a preview?) of Shimmer on her blog. Rene Kirkpatrick is a book buyer at Third Place Books and wrote a review after receiving an advance copy.

You do this, writing, and you write and write and write in the deep darkness of your little office and some part of you hopes that there will be one person out there that you don’t know who you can touch, in some way, but there you are in your dark office, hundreds of pages from done and years from having an agent or a publisher and so often it feels like, no, no one is ever going to read this.

But someone did.

I should mention that I’m signing books at Third Place Books on July 14th. More info later.

I also had a short story accepted this week, in The Louisville Review, which is, of course, now my favorite journal in the world. It’s coming out this spring, which is shocking for me, since usually with stories I’ve had published there was a year or more between acceptance and publication. The story, “The Arsons,” is very short, about a reporter covering a series of arsons in a small Connecticut town. It’s actually part of an as-yet-unpublished novel I wrote, Powdered Milk, about a reporter covering a series of arsons in Connecticut.

It’s great to get a story accepted, for many reasons, but one — the most juvenile of them — is that I get to write the other places that have are looking at the story and tell them it’s been accepted elsewhere. (You have to do this, it’s not an arrogant thing. They don’t want to waste time on a story that’s going to get published elsewhere.) But for someone who has received hundreds and hundreds of story rejections over the years — “The Arsons” was rejected by 45 other journals before being accepted — it’s just so great to be able to write the other publications and say a polite, Sorry.

I shouldn’t get such juvenile joy out of it. But I do.

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