Dreams come true! I sold a novella to @ccfinlay at Magazine of F&SF – @FandSF

I am thrilled, so thrilled, to finally announce my first sale to C.C. Finlay at the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. “Freezing Rain, a Chance of Falling” is a novella set in what I sometimes like to call my Nice Things universe. It’s also a prequel, of sorts, to a Nice Things novel currently titled Goldilocks Conditions. (I’ll tell you a little more about that in the not too distant future.)

I have dreamed of selling a story to F&SF for as long as I can remember, which is a damned long time… the more so, because this particular novella had a long journey to the finish line. Charlie requested first an expansion and then an extended rewrite before we both agreed it was the best story it could possibly be. It is now slated to appear in the upcoming July/August issue of the magazine.

“Freezing Rain, a Chance of Falling” is about a talented young music journalist, Drow Whiting, who gambles all his social capital on what turns out to be a gloriously ill-judged expose. Idealistic, ambitious, and more naive than he cares to admit, Drow is ruined when he covers a diva musician’s plagiarism scam, and her reaction blows up into a full-bore online shame cascade. Soon Drow is a pariah, ready to do anything to recover his reputation, not to mention his career and his rock-bottom credit score. But desperation is like blood in the water, and Drow finds himself in bed with an elderly performance artist, an ancient GenX crone who’s offering to sponsor his investigation into a story everyone says he should leave alone, a first-person look into Toronto’s recreational chemotherapy dens.