Learned tonight that Chris Cevasco will be publishing "The Place That Makes You Happiest" in issue #13 of Paradox. I am immensely happy to have sold to him a second time (and on consecutive stories too), but I'm especially pleased about this one because it brings my really bad lucky streak concerning rewrites to an end at last. Every rewrite I've done until now has been rejected by the market that requested it, so of course I wasn't quite so confident I would sell this one, especially considering the rewrite was one of the most extensive one I've done on request. But Chris thought the rewrite went really well and he really likes the story, which is always fantastic to hear. This was also my WotF finalist story from second quarter of 2007, and I'm really happy to see it go to my own personal favorite magazine.

I owe thanks to several folks who helped along the way with this one: marshall_payne , who read and critiqued the very first draft of this; aliettedb , who read not only the pre-Polish Challenge version before I muckied up the ending, but also read and approved my work on the final, final draft; tchernabyelo  and theladywolf , for their fantastic LH Polish Challenge crits (in which both suggested I kill that really bad ending. I replaced it with a not-quite so bad ending that I ended up chopping off under editorial request); and finally, my good friend Travis Ramsey, who will unfortunately never get to read the story he inspired, but I think he'd have appreciated it. He's been gone since Christmas of 2002, taken far too young by brain cancer, but hardly a day goes by that I don't think about him in some small way.