It received my favorite rejection letter of all time: the editor of Weird Tales turned it down because he found it “bizarre.” Wow, I thought, I’ve written something that’s too weird for Weird Tales. Kamensic Village is the fictionalized version of the small town where I grew up in northern Westchester County; I first started writing stories set there when I was in high school. For a few years in college I worked off and on as a home health aide, and in 1977, when I was nineteen, I spent a week in that small town living with a woman who was dying of cancer. Her cottage became the dying astronaut’s refuge on Sugar Mountain (and her dog, Apollo, became Festus). A few years later, the death of someone I knew triggered what has become a continuing struggle to understand suicide. “Snow on Sugar Mountain” was my first attempt to put this into writing (subsequent efforts include “Last Summer at Mars Hill” and most of my novels). It also hints at my lifelong secret love affair with the American space program.
