Today is an emotional day for me. First of all, it should have been my Mom’s 56th birthday. I don’t think I need to dwell on how I feel about that in this post. I feel as you would imagine I do. Sad, angry, missing her… but, as difficult as it is to reconcile, today is also a very good day. Today I get to announce that my story, Bedtime Story, has been accepted for publication in Tesseracts 17: Speculating Canada from Coast to Coast to Coast.

Having a piece accepted for a Tesseracts anthology has been on my writerly bucket list for forever, and now I get to cross that one off. Mission accomplished! I feel fantastic about that, proud, humbled, encouraged… I am inspired to write and create, to keep pushing forward.

Bedtime Story is a piece that I really struggled with too, so I can’t think of a story more appropriate to be my first foray into the world of Tesseracts. It was inspired in part by a dream, so it’s a little different, a little weird, a little off, but it was also one of the first stories I wrote where I felt I’d successfully shown just the right amount and let my readers fill in the rest for themselves. My mother would have loved it. And she’d have been incredibly happy for me and proud of me for reaching one of my goals I’d worked toward for so long.

Today, though there is no way I’m going to be able to avoid being sad and missing her, I’m going to try very hard to focus on the good parts of the day too. It’s what she would have wanted.

TESSERACTS 17: SPECULATING CANADA FROM COAST TO COAST TO COAST

• Introduction: What is a Tesseract? Colleen Anderson
• Vermilion Wine: Claude Lalumière
• Night Journey: West Coast: Eileen Kernaghan
• The Wall: Rhea Rose
• 2020 Vision: Lisa Smedman
• Why Pete?: Timothy Reynolds
• Bird Bones: Megan Fennell
• Bedtime Story: Rhonda Parrish
• Graveyard Shift: Holly Schofield
• Path of Souls: Edward Willett
• Sin A Squay: David Jón Fuller
• Hereinafter Referred to as the Ghost: Mark Leslie
• Anywhere: Alyxandra Harvey
• Secret Recipes: Costi Gurgu
• Star Severer: Ben Godby
• The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife: Dave Beynon
• Graffiti Borealis: Lisa Poh
• My Child Has Winter in His Bones: Dominik Parisien
• Team Leader 2040: Catherine Austen
• Sand Hill: Elise Moser
• The Ripping: Vincent Grant Perkins
• Unwilling to Turn Around: J.J. Steinfield
• Pique Assiette: Catherine MacLeod
• Leaving Cape Roseway: John Bell
• Everybody Wins: Rachel Cooper
• In the Bubble: William Meikle
• Hermione and Me: Dwain Campbell
• Blizzard Warning: Jason Barrett
• M.E.L.: Dianne Homan
• The Calligrapher’s Daughter: Patricia Robertson
• Afterword: Editing Anthologies Made Easy: Steve Vernon