Twenty Thousand Roads

Though there will be a handful of brand-spanking new stories in I Have Always Been Here Before, most of them have been published in various places. Each of them had a long, twisted road to publication, garnering rejections and evolving through major revision overhauls along the way. Then there are those that got left at the altar. These four stories all found a home, only to have it disappear out from under them. Some of them are among my favorites in the collection, and they all represent hard lessons I had to learn about the publishing racket. "No Harm At All" had perhaps the toughest luck of all these hard-knock stories. I wrote it over a decade ago, and it was accepted to one of the first places I sent it—an anthology about modern masculinity being published by a small but seemingly well-established publisher in the Midwest. I was ecstatic about this publication. Two of my favorite big-name (well, sort of) writers had stories in it, I was working closely with an edito