Story sold to Myriad Lands

Excellent news! My story "Untouched by Fire" has sold to the Myriad Lands anthology to be published this summer by Guardbridge Books. I first wrote this story...quite a while ago. Even ten years, I believe. I was in the middle of getting ready to write a novel set in a caste-based society strongly influenced by the history and peoples of India (working hard to immerse myself in a variety of aspects of the cultural dynamics there, so I didn't come across as some rampaging pillager). So, as I've often done when getting ready to dive into a new world and a new novel, I decided to write a short story set there. The full world was still fairly vague in my mind, but the story helped bring it to light. In fact, the character I created for the story--Jaritta, whose scar from a fire has caused her to be outcast--became such a strong character in my mind that she ended up being one of the central characters of the novel, which is set some fifteen years after this story. The story had a variety of close-but-not-quite rejections from pro markets over the years, but never could seem to find a home even as I continued to tweak and strengthen this or that part of it (much like the novel got a number of close-but-not-quite reactions from agents over that same time...), so I'm very thrilled to finally have some aspect* of the land of Eghsal see the light of day.

*Technically, in my mind anyway, this story of mine written even a few months earlier--"The Ship of Silk on the Calmest Sea"--was always meant to be a sort of folk tale told by the people of Eghsal. So in that sense a bit of the cultural heritage of the land has been published before...but its connection to the rest was never made explicit.