Just by the way the envelope felt in his hand, Lawrence Breton knew what it contained.

“Another rejection letter, of course,” he said, tossing it unopened into the fire. This was not the fireplace with the white brick, the medieval logs, the eloquent wrought-iron grate, and the Kodiak rug: that was the one he thought he’d have by now. It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford it, but that he only wanted to buy it with book royalties. Lawrence Breton was arriving at the opinion that all publishers were soulless reptiles whose categorical genocide of science fiction writers was the greatest literary misunderstanding of the century.