My poem “The Cosmos Chronicler” will appear in Polar Borealis #6. The issue is scheduled for a spring 2018 release, and will be available as a free PDF download. Appearing in the same issue will be my friend Lena Ng, which makes this extra special.

Another thing that makes it special: Assuming (hoping, praying) all goes according to schedule, this will be my first published piece of either story or poetry.

The full impact hasn’t quite hit me. Maybe it will when it’s out. The past several months have been wonderful… and very, very strange. I went from ten years of rejections to several acceptances within a few months (idea for a future blog post: that rejection mountain). Not that I’m complaining—I know full well how incredible this is. It just feels surreal, more “is this really happening?” and less “this-is-happening-and-I’m-going-to-run-around-screaming!”

It may be a little odd, that my first publication will be a poem. But it’s fitting. Generally, I think of myself as a storyteller more than a poet. Telling stories is something I’ve done for as long as I can remember. Poetry I started doing in a more normal way, the way most kids start: with school assignments. (Some I went completely overboard for. Such as writing seven-page epics before I got out of elementary school. How and why did I do that? I can barely write an epic now.)

However, if you were to ask me which I started writing first, poetry or prose… I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Until I was ten I didn’t write my stories down. I’m not sure which came first: my poem about Christmas fairies or my Anne of Green Gables rip-off first chapter (Hey, I was ten!). So in a way poetry influenced me to write things rather than just imagine them.

Now I shall climb out of the nostalgia tunnel. More announcements soon, for short stories!