small but gratifying moments

Hands down, this one today. A tweet from my long ago former student Serene Vannoy about THE MISSING GIRL: "I saw your book in a bookstore in my new town (New Mexico) & just had to buy it even though I already have a copy. It was just so cool."

Also some nice soft rejects, one from THE RUMPUS today that's strong enough to make me consider sending that microflash out to more places. At the moment I've run out of steam for submissions, and I'm much more involved in THE LUNATICS' BALL.

And larger progress on THE LUNATICS' BALL. Two more essays ready for my writing group to look at. And out of the blue, a great beta reader: Claire Polders, whose work I love, has proposed swapping full-length manuscripts. Because she's so well organized, I assembled a definitive table of contents with actual lengths for each piece and came up with around 50K. Two flash framing six sections of varying sizes (6K-12K). Whether these very disparate pieces will hang together is another question, but I'm glad to have someone looking at the work as a whole.