I sold a short story to Orca Literary Journal yesterday! It’s a non-genre flash piece called A Season’s End and will be in their second issue. I can’t really begin to explain how excited I am. But I will try…

All sales are super exciting. Writers have to have a thick skin about rejections—because you’re going to get a lot of them. So when you finally punch a sale home, it feels like vindication. Now, I have had nine novels, eleven short stories, three graphic novels, two nature books, two poems, and a picture book published. That seems like a lot.

But my mother is Jane Yolen. Author of 378 (and counting) books for children and adults. Grandmaster of the Science Fiction Writers of America. The Hans Christian Andersen of American children’s literature.

To say I have imposter syndrome is underselling my condition by a huge margin.

And to make it so much worse, seven of the novels, four of the short stories, and all of the graphic novels, nature books, and picture books were co-written with my mother.

It is not difficult to imagine how much fun my brain has with those numbers when it decides that I have no business putting pen to paper.

I love my mother, And I am thankful for everything she’s done for me. She taught me nearly everything I know about writing, though that percentage is shrinking; my current writers group, Wyrdsmiths, gives me hard lessons twice a month. I love writing with her and wouldn’t trade it for anything. She’s a master of the craft as well as a delight to work with. And yet…

I maybe celebrate my solo sales just little bit more than our sales together. Especially this latest, sold to people I’ve never met, in a genre my mother is not well-known in—at least probably not enough for my connection to her to be known. Even my brain—mean, old, crafty bastard that it is—is having trouble denigrating this one.