In the Mail

Little victories can keep you going. I finished drafting my collection, Accretion, and will be dropping it into the mail tomorrow for the publisher to consider. It's one milestone that I've been working toward for two or three months, and it's nice to get it done (for now). The collection kept me busy as I did some reading to flesh out material for my upcoming novel.

The title of the collection merits a little discussion. Accretion is a gradual accumulation, normally associated with the formation of stars and planets. The collection gathers most of my published work over the past decade and change, including my very first paid publication, After the Campfire Dies, a stargazing article that appeared in Dakota Outdoors in the mid 1990s, my first published fiction that appeared in Planet online magazine, a story that shares a title and many plot points with my novel Neanderthal Swan Song, and my first pro sale, The Adjoa Gambit, originally appearing in Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show. So Accretion is a gradual accumulation of my early work.

I intend to do more volumes when I have the material, tentitively called Protostar, Main Sequence, Red Giant, Nova, White Dwarf, and Black Dwarf. I expect it will take a lifetime to fill them all.