Friday morning I put seven—yes, seven—stories in the mail, including one called "The Day Pietro Coppino Spoke to the Mountain" which I wrote the first draft of thirteen years ago but which I only became satisfied with after rewriting it last week. This brought my total number of stories-in-the-mail to thirteen.
Saturday morning I appeared on Jim Freund's radio show "Hour of the Wolf," and I had a fabulous time. Jim is a wonderful interviewer, and he put me right at ease. I happen to know that I was nervous, but my wife said she couldn't tell by listening. During the first hour of the show we discussed Missionary Man and my early days attempting to write science fiction. During the second half of the show I read my story "The Day Pietro Coppino Spoke to the Mountain." Jim was pleased that I chose to read an unpublished story—making my reading on his show effectively the story's first publication. He called it a "remarkable story," which pleased me.
Jim taped the show for me right in the studio. Someday I will digitize it and put it online.
Later that morning █████ and I drove to Vermont for a friend's birthday party. We stayed overnight and arrived back Sunday evening, in time to watch old clips from Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows on the WNET Thirteen fund drive. (That number crops up a lot in this post, apparently.)
This morning I finished polishing up a brief excerpt from the epilogue of Missionary Man for submission as a standalone essay. This was sparked by last week's announcement that the Mormon church will take the building it owns across from Lincoln Center in Manhattan and turn the top two stories into a small temple. I mailed the essay today to The New York Times Magazine for its weekly "Lives" feature.
And then I arrived home to find a letter from John Klima of Electric Velocipede. He has accepted my short story "Mrs. Janokowski Hits One Out of the Park" for publication. See, I knew if I could keep thirteen stories out in the mail, I'd sell at least one!
I had hoped to go to Dixon Place this evening and see the New York Review of Science Fiction reading with Jack Ketchum this evening, but I didn't feel well. I felt much better, though, after John Klima's letter.
