And the verdict is--now ... or as close to now as possible

Thank you to everyone who responded yesterday to my question about when to release "On the Highway"--I really appreciate it.

In terms of the story, it made intuitive sense to me to release it between Christmas and New Year's--after all, it's a story set on New Year's Eve! When would people want to read that story? When they're thinking of New Year's Eve--or so my logic went.

But the arguments for releasing it as early as possible made good sense to me too, and that's what I've ended up going with. The story will be available Monday, and I'll post links.

I've been playing with this story in my head for years. I'm fascinated with all the possible permutations of the ghostly hitchhiker tale, and also [supernatural] roadside encounters generally. Another story I wrote that played with those elements was "The October Witch," which some of you may remember. "On the Highway" isn't as folklorish as "The October Witch," which is part of why I decided to publish it myself--I couldn't really think of venues to submit it to, and thought I could do a good job packaging and presenting it myself.

a cold day

I had to walk back to the house along the highway this morning, after dropping the car (the remaining car...) off for scheduled maintenance.

It was so cold, penetratingly cold, killingly cold, and windy--but it was morning, and the sun was out.



This afternoon, walking that same route back to the mechanic's, it was a race between me and darkness. The clouds were rosy when I set out, and there was incandescent golden-orange brilliance behind the supermarket. But the light was dying and the wind was fierce, and I felt *very fragile* walking against the stream of homeward-bound cars. Almost no one walks that bit of road. Where there was briefly a sidewalk, I passed a woman walking her dog. Otherwise, I had my footprints from the morning for company. Somehow, my journey felt supernatural. When I was walking, step after step, through the crusty snow, pushing aside briars and the skeletons of mugwort or goldenrod on the safe side of a crash barrier, I felt that I wasn't in the same world as the people driving in cars. I was in some huge, howling, dark world, a world of coldness that would be happy to extinguish every living thing. When I made it to the mechanic's and opened the door into that warmth, I felt staggeringly relieved.

And then I drove home. And I myself was in that nice, ordinary world that I'd been on the outside of, walking on the roadside. But I could remember it.