Passing temporal markers, Cap’n.

I just noticed that I have two anniversaries this spring.

The first one is personal–it’s the 25th anniversary of my move from Germany to the United States. I moved here in May of 1996. I know that it’s technically a quarter of a century, but I don’t like thinking of it that way because it makes me feel unbelievably old. But you can’t argue with math. I was 24 when I arrived, and I’ll be 50 this year, so I’ve spent more than half of my life here.

The second anniversary is professional. Ten years ago, I sold my first piece of fiction, a short story called Ink and Blood, to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. (It’s still available to read online here.)  I went to the Viable Paradise SF/F workshop on the Vineyard in 2008, so after that it took me three years to sell my first story and five years to sell my first novel. And I was working on my writing skills quite a while before I even got to VP, so my OVERNIGHT SUCCESS only took the better part of a decade.

But what an interesting decade it has been since that story appeared in BCS #74. I sold Terms of Enlistment and its sequel to 47North in the spring of 2013, and I’ve been able to write full-time ever since. It took me until my forties to figure out that I wasn’t really cut out for any other kind of work, so to those of you who are submitting stories and trying to get a foot in the door, I’d say not to worry about being too late to the party. Nothing moves fast in the publishing field anyway.