My novella “After the Harvest, Before the Fall” is in the January/February 2017 issue of Analog, which went on sale December 20th, and though I took note of that event over on Twitter and Facebook, I made no mention of it here, because I thought I’d said everything I want to say back when I’d made the sale, which was 44 years in coming.

Apparently not.

Holding the issue in my hands, peeling back the cover, and seeing my name at last on the Table of Contents, I wondered … what would 17-year-old me have felt if given a peek into the future, and allowed to peer over my shoulder at his name there?

I suspect he would have said something like, “What took took so long, old man?”

It’s not that I was an impatient when I was a teenager writing my first stories, for even then I did not argue with the judgement of editors, and knew things would take the time they needed to take. I believe rather, that he, looking ahead to me, looking back at him, would have laid the responsibility entirely on us.

Why didn’t we write more? Why didn’t we submit more? If only we had, surely this meaningful publication would have occurred sooner.

As I consider how I might have responded to the younger me, I think I’d have said something like—

Well, yes … I could have written more, submitted more, but only if I hadn’t been busy living. And if I hadn’t been busy living, I’d probably never have learned the things I needed to know to write the story which eventually did sell, so while we, together, might have written more words, more stories, we might have done so without ever having written the one good enough to crack Analog.

I’d like to think the me of then and the me of now would have reached an understanding.

Whether or not we would have doesn’t change the fact that as I held the issue in my hands and read my own words set in the Analog typeface while inhaling the aroma of that Analog paper, I was smiling the entire time.

Knowing that though it took me 44 years to make this sale, it took only 10 months for me to make a second Analog sale, of a story which I hope you’ll be able to read not too long from now, why, that made me smile all the more.