Welcome to this All Self-Promotion Edition of Unsettling Futures!So the big news is that there's an audio drama podcast coming out soon, and it's based on a story I wrote!Broken Road, (which you can already subscribe to on your podcast app of choice, hint hint) is based on Patience Lake, a short story that appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction back in 2016, and the following year was picked by the late, great Gardner Dozois to be in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection.This is pretty special, because it's the first* professional adaptation of anything I've written. I don't really know what it's going to be like – it sounds like there's some areas that line up very much with the plot and themes of Patience Lake, and I suspect there will be some significant differences from what I wrote, too.And you know what? That's fine.I kind of understand writers who treat their work like it's their baby, and they want to shepherd it through the adaptation process and make it true to their vision, and all of that.But… I really don't worry about that at all. The story is the story, and it always will be. The adaptation will be its own animal, as adaptations must be. And that's interesting to me; I'm intrigued to see what someone else does with my idea, how they change it, and what they find in it, what they add to it.So I'll be listening along as the episodes come out, discovering a new version of the story.The only other thing I have to say is that Patience Lake is pretty special to me.I sold a pair of stories, my first sales, back in the mid-aughts, to SciFiction. (Yeah, a long time ago, if you remember SciFiction.) And then I didn't sell anything for eleven years. For a couple of those years, I wasn't even writing – some of it was being distracted by other things in life, many of them worthwhile, but there was also a lot of inertia, laziness, general faffing about. In 2013, I realized that I wouldn't be satisfied with myself if I didn't get back to writing, get back to trying to get published again. I had sold stories, I knew it was possible. So I buckled down, I worked on writing regularly. And Patience Lake wasn't the first short story to come out of that effort, but it was the best one, the one I knew had a good chance. Even so, when I got the acceptance from Sheila Williams at Asimov's, I darn near had to be pried off the ceiling. Same when I got an email from Gardner Dozois, right out of the blue, saying he was considering it for one of his anthologies. And from there, it found its way into the hands of the folks at Recursor who bought the option and made Broken Road.And if you're curious, I'm including the story's opening below. I hope it grabs you, and I hope you like the adaptation, too.