This week, I have a bit of happy news to share.  “Dog Helps Those,” a short story I wrote just over a year ago, will be published in a forthcoming issue of DreamForge magazine.

This story has a special place in my heart.  I wrote it while struggling with the side effects of surgery to fix my badly damaged right rotator cuff.  I wrote about the writing challenges in detail here and here.  The short version is that I did manage to finish in time to give a cold reading at Bubonicon.

Although the story went over well, I couldn’t seem to find an editor who liked it as much as my audience and I did.  Thus, it languished until Scot Noel—who had rejected it the first time around because it didn’t fit his image of the theme he was using for DreamForge that year—got in touch this past weekend to find out if the story was still available.

Fortuitous for all involved, which is one reason I chose the above photo to go with this week’s Wanderings. 

Last Sunday, Jim and I had a phone call from our next-door neighbor, asking if we were having problems with bugs eating the leaves of our datura.  She’d gotten the seeds from us in the first place, thus the question.

When I went out to look at our patch, I was surprised to see that the datura was still in bloom, and looking particularly lovely, with the soft light bringing out a hint of pale lavender along the edges.  Datura flowers at dusk, and usually closes shortly after sunrise.  However, a combination of a somewhat cloudy morning, along with shade in that corner had conspired to keep the flowers open.  I told Jim, and he went out to look, camera in hand, just as sunlight reached the patch, enabling him to use natural light to get a backlit photo.

Fortuitous indeed.

Now, off to continue collaborating with David Weber to give an initial shape to the next Star Kingdom/Stephanie Harrington novel.

Oh!  And fortune had favored the datura, too.  Whatever was chewing on Linda’s had pretty much left ours alone.