Validation

And I hope someday they’ll say hooray for me — Bruce Hornsby

We never get tons of trick-or-treaters, but they came sporadically throughout the evening until about 10 pm. At first I thought no one was going to come at all when none appeared before 7:15, but the local mall held a petting zoo/party thing that ended at 7:00, so I guess that explains why.

My wife’s idea was the hit of the evening. She bought a couple of packages of small glowsticks, and we gave those out to every visitor along with the usual handful of candy. I thought in this day and age of high-tech gadgetry and lifelike special effects that kids would have a ho-hum response to such low-tech gizmos, but they were met with almost unanimous response of “cool!” I remember when glowsticks first became commercially available, about 20 years ago. They were only available in phosphorescent green. Now, any Day-Glo color you want you can get. As a chemist, I find them geekily cool. The kids almost left the door without waiting for candy, they were so thrilled with them.

I received an e-mail later on in the evening that made my day/week/month. Jason Sizemore from Apex Digest wrote to tell me that I had won their second annual Halloween short story contest. I won’t list all the things I won in addition to some cash and publication in Apex, but click here to see it all. The “swag” prizes are worth at least twice the cash prize. It’s an amazingly generous reward. The celebrity judges were: Cherie Priest, Michael Laimo, and M.M. Buckner.

The theme was alien witchcraft. My story is called “Sufficiently Advanced” (the title is drawn from an oft-quoted observation by Arthur C. Clarke), and it was my attempt to turn the theme upside down and pull it inside out without breaking it. I’d tell you more, but I’d rather you read the story in issue 9. Since Apex is a quarterly mag and issue 7 is out now, I expect the issue with my story will appear in early-to-mid 2007.

It’s really quite remarkable how big a lift something like this gave me. I was very pleased. Got up this morning and rode the wave of elation to 1300 words on the novel-in-progress. Not quite NaNoWriMo pace (1667) but it’s a start, given that I haven’t touched the manuscript in months.

Did anyone watch The Unit last night? I thought the last-minute reveal was hilarious! We both predicted that Midge wasn’t going to be the wife, but who it turned out to be was pretty funny.