Sold: The Lonely Hunter

I've sold my recently completed novella The Lonely Hunter (the one whose working title was The 5000 Spirits) to Pete Crowther and Nick Gevers at PS Publishing for standalone publication in 2011.

I'm absolutely hopping with delight about this, since I can't imagine there could ever be a better home for the piece -- which I love inordinately. It's a sort of slipstream/interstitial story, slightly displaced into the future although not science fiction, a fantasy-of-perception about literary creativity and loneliness and alienation and obsession, and maybe it's a murder mystery as well. Such items, especially when 25,000 words long, are, ahem, a hard sell to the genre magazines . . . It's an enormous credit to Pete and Nick that they've created somewhere that's as welcoming to the unclassifiable as it is to more obviously genre material. And they're a joy to work with.

At the same time, of course, there's always that sense of slight panic I have on making a sale to PS or The Anthology Once Named Postscripts. PS Publishing's standards are so goddam high, and their stable of authors so imposing and terrific, that I feel quite intimidated: come 2011, my humble offering is going to be judged by all the world in that context. Ulp. On the other hand, PS's publication last winter of The City in These Pages (see icon) didn't bring too many brickbats my way, so . . . yeah, maybe I'll survive the experience.