One of the single most enjoyable moments of my fledgling horror writing career was getting this email:
If you're reading this email, that means you've submitted a short story to our Lost Signals anthology. It also means you've all made it past not only our first round of reading, but our second, third, and fourth. At this point, we're still in the process of narrowing down the table of contents. Since it's after the 15th, I just wanted to send out a quick update. If you haven't heard back from us yet, your story is still under consideration. Very, very strong consideration. Right now, we have a strong selection of just over 200,000 words we would love to accept. The fact remains that we simply cannot publish an anthology so large. There are some very tough decisions ahead of us, and we plan to have all stories responded to by the end of November, so we are asking for a little bit more time to go over all these wonderful stories a few more times.
Followed quickly by THE most enjoyable moment, that of reading this:
Thank you for sending us "Rosabelle, Believe". After many, many rounds of reading, we have decided to accept your story.
This piece almost didn't happen. I sat on the submission call for months, hoping the muse would drop some ideas in my lap, until finally a decent one hit me.
Lost Signals drops today. Go get it, read it, and let me know what you think. It's a beautiful book and I'm honored to have a story included in it.
