I’ve been paving a road to somewhere with good intentions about my writing so long that if I’d just linked the paving stones together and used them as a lever, I could have swapped proverbs and moved a mountain instead. So a few weeks ago, when my estimable pater was in town, we went on a Writer’s Market safari to Powell’s.

I was somewhat disillusioned with the great WriterMarketbeast, when brought to earth, for it proved to be more or less what it claimed; a book to help writers of all stripes find places to sell their writing; included in all stripes, of course, one finds stripes such as ‘writers upon industrial metal-coating processes’ and ‘writers who do consumer comparison articles on fishing lures’. While I in my egotism had assumed the Writer’s Market would be more specifically tailored to my needs, I do not begrudge the coating-fanciers and literary fisherpeople of the world their moment in print; however, shelling out the odd forty or fifty ducats for several inches of their moments in print seemed a bit much.

Looking at the back covers of this tome and its companions (such as Poetry Writer’s Market and Children’s Writer’s Market) I discovered my dream had a form and a name: [http://faerye.net/img/articles/novss_writersmarket.jpg|image|Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market]. I suppose Portland has more than its fair share of aspiring authors, or perhaps they move in packs and Powell’s was unprepared for their onslaught, for while the other specimens it had in plenty, this, my desired volume, was sadly lacking. Powell’s Beaverton apparently suffers from much the same pandemic of roving fictionalists, and I was forced to abandon my local bookstore and take solace in the comforting card catalog of Amazon.

Now at long last it has come, and at long last I’ve been at my complex within office hours to pick it up, and at long last I feel like doing something more than falling asleep, taking a bubble bath, or fighting the forces of smoke detection. Time to crack the book and start searching out all the ‘NOs’ that stand between me and ‘YES.’ Time to find out if there really is an Anthropomorphized Crime Story Digest.