The life and death of George Hayes, a story inspired by an oddity on a Falk map of the Azores and my subsequent less-than-successful Google search, is now with Asimov’s.

After writing 1,000 words in the summer of 2010, and another 8,000 in November in hurried preparation for the 7th Villa Diodati Writers Workshop, and receiving a ton of excellent feedback, comments and editing tips from my co-workshoppers, I did nothing with the story for half a year while I adjusted to expecting, then buying and moving to a larger house in order to accommodate, and then welcoming, our second child.

The story wasn’t doing nothing though. In my head, the workshop comments fermented, and coagulated, and collided, and engaged in exotic chemical reactions, and finally gelled. So today, with our eldest spending the weekend with Grandmom and Granddad, and the youngest celebrating his fifth week of life by sleeping a great deal, I finally got around to doing what I always do in these cases: I edited the story as much as it needed by changing as little as I possibly could.

In this case, editing also entailed striking about 1,000 words, most of them the endless location descriptions that prompted Jeff Spock to re-title the story The Lonely Planet Guide to not being immortal, and all the other workshop participants to exhort me to ease up on the travelogue.

One more item off my writing todo list. If I’m not careful, I will have to write new work soon!