In all the excitement I had in July, I neglected to mention the release of this spiff new anthology, Twenty Epics, edited by David Moles and Susan Marie Groppi. They put this book together, they wrote, because "[e]pics have lost their charm. There was a time when you finished an epic. When an epic left you feeling not discontent and exhausted, but joyous, melancholy, rejuvenated, satisfied — left you feeling that you were a better person for the experience."
The idea, then, was to bring back that epic feeling, oh-ohh that epic feeling, but to do it without writing a twelve-book "cycle." At long last, I'd found a home for my last unpublished Clarion West story, "Two Figures in a Landscape Between Storms." It's only about 400 words long, and I don't know about joyous, but it's got lots of melancholy.
If you'd like to read my story and nineteen others by some fine writers, you can order the book right here. I'm not sure if it's available through bricks 'n' mortar stores.
For the record, the words from my piece listed in the index are armor, blood, sandstone, war and wounds. Since I use most of 'em more than once, that's like five or six percent of the story right there.