sold: "The Gara Smood"

I received yesterday the delightful news that Vera Nazarian 
(norilanabooks) is buying my 13,250-word story "The Gara Smood" for her anthology Sky Whales and Other Wonders. The story is one that's been about twenty years in the writing, I think. I started playing with it as a fantasy of perception/surrealistic urban fantasy 'way back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, but at the time, and every few years since then, it didn't want to come together. Only when I was consciously writing stories towards my "mosaic novel" Leaving Fortusa did a sciencefictional idea and a future-history idea come along and clamour to be melded in with the original fantasy. The three strands together gave a story that had a nice strong backbone as well as, I hope, some conceptual depth.

I was amused to notice that, when Mike Allen (time_shark) announced his own sale to Vera for this anthology, he indicated his piece didn't comfortably fit in any single genre -- that it sort of straddled several, sort of, kind of, sort of . . . The same is obviously true, as you'll gather from the paragraph above, of "The Gara Smood". This is the kind of editorial policy that, as a reader, I like to see in anthologies, you bet!

The anthology's quasi-title story, "The Sky Won't Listen", is apparently a new piece by Tanith Lee, which is pleasing in itself. This sounds like it's going to be a fine book, and I'm proud that a story of mine has been selected to be a part of it.