A home for "Target Practice"

I'm a bit tardy with this, as the e-mail came the day I packed up to go to America last-minute, but the first chapter of The Shore, in which Chloe appears and which I have been trying to home appropriately for a while, has been published in issue 5 of The Fog Horn Magazine.

I'm particularly happy about this, as the editors did not ask me to change the ending to be 'a little bit nicer', which has made me turn down offers of magazine publication before; many thanks are due to Lucy Luck (agent extraordinaire) for brokering the arrangement. Also, The Fog Horn has a relatively low subscription cost - it works out to $1 per published story, and gets you free access to all of the back issues. 5% of their proceeds go to 826LA, a non-profit that supports young students in developing creative and critical writing skills. As a student that's never been able to justify the subscription cost of one of the big literary magazines and has in the past gotten quite creative about funding her education, this is too much happy for words.

(Props to the Randolph College Writing Lab, which left copies of The Sun, OneStory, and similar lying about for the consumption of the great unwashed. Also, I suppose, thanks to the rich students of that institution who indiscriminately abandoned designer goods and electronics on move-out day and funded my return to the UK for the Masters degree.)

Also, another happy thing that effects literally no one outside my program: I've been given funding for the rest of my degree, provided I finish the degree by the end of 2016. They don't publicize how many funded places are on offer, but the general consensus is that there are not many; I know exactly one person in the cohort that is funded, and we're a gossipy species. The Hub is pretty lax about sending out notices that all of the funding has been dispensed and that hopefuls can stop hyperventilating every time a new message pings in their inbox, so I may be casually avoiding department social events until the tension dies down. Just because no one talks about researchers being assassinated for their funding doesn't mean it doesn't happen.