There’s a certain pleasure to breaking into a market that hasn’t bought anything from you before. But there’s also a pleasure, of a different flavor, to selling them a second story.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which previously published (and podcasted) my Nine Lands story “Kingspeaker,” has now purchased a Driftwood story titled (surprise!) “Driftwood.” (Thanks to the vagaries of the creative process, this was the first story I wrote for that setting, but it took longer to beat into publishable shape than “A Heretic by Degrees,” which came out more or less right in the first draft.) ninja_turbo, I think this means you’re officially allowed to be a Driftwood fanboy now.

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The Ell-Jays are going through another round of the discussion on Representing the Other, sparking some thoughts, but none really concrete enough for me to articulate them here. It does, however, remind me of a realization I had the other week, watching The House of Flying Daggers.

Driftwood being the kind of place it is, not everybody there is human-shaped, and the ones who are, aren’t necessarily human-colored. Because of that, there’s no actor who’s precisely my mental image of Last. But there’s no reason in this world or any other that he has to have European facial structure, and so it occurred to me that if you dyed Takeshi Kaneshiro the right colors, he’d be my casting for the part.

Turns out a lot of my short story sales recently have featured secondary-world characters of a chromatic nature. This is what we call “a start.” But I want to do better in this world, and also in novels.