I think so, anyway.

I’ve known about this for a few weeks, but I’ve been cleared to announce that my novelette “All That You Leave Behind” will be appearing in the anthology Lost Signals, edited by Max Booth III and his partner-in-crime Lori Michelle and published by Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing.  Here’s the cover, by the stunning Matthew Revert:

This will be the second time I’ve worked with PMMP and Max (they published my standalone story “Survivor’s Debt” as an ebook a few years back, as part of their One Night Stands series that is, sadly, no more), and the third time I’ve worked with Max (I edited his first novel, Toxicity).  Sounds nepotism-tastic (nepotastic?), but isn’t; I’ve been cruising the Facebooks and seeing writers who didn’t make the final cut who have even deeper relationships with PMMP (my connection kinda ends with my and Max’s love of Modest Mouse).  Sign of a good editor – someone who might be a friend but will still tell you to fuck off–nicely, maybe–if you don’t unfortunately have the goods that time.

The story’s a fun and cheery tale of recovering, emotionally, from a miscarriage; the story sparked from a throwaway line in Lauren Beukes’ Broken Monsters about ghost heartbeats and mixed with something that’s attributed to Ernest Hemingway but isn’t really his, as much as historians can tell: “For sale: Baby shoes.  Never used.”  I buried all the fears my wife and I when she was pregnant with the bug, and it apparently paid off; Max messaged me right after reading the story with just the statement, “Goddamn, son.”

This is the second publicly-acknowledged pieces appearing in 2016 (the antho is scheduled for May/June); the other is “The Agonizing Guilt of Relief (Last Days of a Ready-Made Victim)” in Chiral Mad 3 by Written Backwards–which also took the time recently to say very nice and very unnecessary things about me.   I’m still waiting on contracts for a third piece, and this doesn’t count my essays about Stephen King’s The Talisman and Insomnia that will be popping up over at StephenKingRevisited.com, or my Super-Duper Secret Project that has me doing little happy-dances when my mind happens upon the subject.

So, you know, there’s that.  2016’s looking like it might not suck.  Fingers-crossed, gang.