I’ve had two more sales since the last time I updated, and one of them came out yesterday! “Message from Beyond” is a bit less heavy than a lot of my stories, more of a funnish ghost story, so if that sounds like your sort of thing, go check it out!

This is my first time selling again to a market I’ve previously sold to, which is a cool kind of landmark.

So I’ve got six sales now, five of them at professional rates. I’ve also got three sales so far in 2015, which makes this my most successful year to date by most measures. Beyond that, though, it feels like in the last month or two I’ve started to get a handle on what I’m doing.

When I’ve written a salable story before, luck has been a large element, because I’m trying to figure this process out as I go. For most of my writing life, I have found writing very difficult. I’ll sit for hours some times to produce very small wordcounts, and only occasionally have productive bursts. It hasn’t kept me from writing because on some level I’ve never felt like I had a choice.Writing is cathartic for me, and having written is immensely satisfying. I write not because it’s fun, but because I have things I desperately need to get out, and this is my way.

Recently, though, I feel like I’ve figured out what my process is. I can consistently sit down to write and churn out words, and what’s more, I actually pretty much like them—or when I don’t, I have confidence in my revision process, that I’ll be able to polish them into something I will like. (Of course, as soon as I feel like I’ve leveled up, I always seem to try to stretch in some new direction, so I can feel lost again.)

It’s a very exciting time for me–and a very frustrating time, because any stories I write right now will take weeks if not months to shop around, and then further weeks or months to see publication, so I’m in a position where I feel like I’ve hit a new threshold, but there is no evidence of this that I can point to.

So, hey! Watch this space!