A bit of recognition

Just a lil bit. Fictiondaily.org found Mandala, I know not how. The teaser they used to entice people to the site was:

"For all I knew, she was a bug-eyed wallaby with a taste for gallium arsenide: the stuff my brains are made of."

It comes early, but really, is that the best sentence in it? Authors are supposed to be bad judges of their work, so I'm not going to question that judgment. I can wonder, though...

In the nine thousand words of the story, they chose those 23? Just asking. Not: "She blinked, and I mourned for them in the moment they were hidden." Not, "It was never the eunuchs who led in battle, monks who won the West, or placid women who strode across the rockseas of Cleopatra's World." not, "Sky of ink, falling tiny round laces of snow, and in the center of it all, us together, the still point on the spinning world, in the twirling galaxy."
Who am I to say?

Mandala sold

A Fly in Amber

VERY happy about this one. First Novelette. I really love this story, as immodest as that sounds. Sometimes characters become so alive that it doesn't really seem that you own them any more. The bird flies from the nest where it will. Is it a first contact story, a love story, a road story? Echoes of the Odyssey, Jungian psychology and of Niven's World out of Time. If you've never been on a New England winter sleighride, sung Palestrina, or walked a labyrinth, you can. Out in May. Link when I get it.