People liked the short…

People liked the short story I wrote yesterday, yay! (Thanks again for looking at it, beta readers!) Minor edits, and then I'm sending it out today. It's another one in the world of the novel; this one is centered on a side character, Nuala O'Brien, a young police officer (and my protagonist's best friend in the novel). The incident in the story isn't one that will make it into the novel, I think, but a) writing it helped me figure out more about her character and the world, which is always helpful, and b) it gave me a short story of its own.

Hopefully someone will buy it (two previous, "Communion" and "Webs" were sold to Clarkesworld and Asimov's, respectively). And hopefully at some point in the future, there'll be enough of them to be worth issuing them as a separate collection, something like Bujold's Borders of Infinity book, which has a brief frame story connecting three novellas. Another story I wrote, "Thin Air," doesn't seem to have quite enough plot to work as a stand-alone, so it may get woven into a book at some point. (I'm tentatively calling the collection _War Stories_ in my head already.)

Mostly, this is just a model that really seems to work for me, the spin-off short story, so I recommend it unto those of you writing novels, perhaps for when you're deep in the weeds and need a break. :-) It works for me as a reader too -- I love getting a new Bujold story that links back into one of her worlds.

Plan for today: do the minor edits and send the story out, then back to revising the next chapter of the novel.