Callooh! Callay!

I'm having another one of those moments. When you can't quite believe a thing has come to pass. This seems to be a recurring theme of 2014.

In February, I told you about selling my first story to Lightspeed Magazine. And today, I can tell you that story is available in Issue #51.

It's a milestone for me and I can't stop grinning. You would think that after fourteen years of writing and selling stories, it would get old. That the shine would wear off, that you would stop caring when an editor says YES. Oh another story sale, YAWN.

Nope. That is not a thing.

The spaceman shows up on a hot summer afternoon, not in the dead of night when you're crouched in the garden peering through a telescope that shows you the endless glories and wonders of the night sky. There's no spaceship making a bright arc against a star-spangled sky. Just a man in a spacesuit, standing at the edge of your hammock. His presence reminds you school is over and relatives will be coming soon and you don't want to see them. They will ask you who can't see beyond the edge of your hammock about grades and ambitions and Plans For the Future. Aunt Fran is dead and there's just no fixing it, but funerals help us move on, Mom says so, and Mom Knows Best. You don't want to go, because going means it happened and going means something is over.

This story pokes fun at science fiction and Doctor Who and the tropes of both, but there's a deeper story layered inside the humor, the idea that we lose things and cannot always explain why, even if science can -- death happens, death happens a lot in 2014, but what does science know about loss, because...because... Everything will be lost, even if you have pockets, because they're--

Well, pockets are stranger than anything, aren't they?

So are spacemen.

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You can completely buy issue #51 now! "A Box, a Pocket, a Spaceman" will also be available on the Lightspeed website August 19, along with a keen interview with me!

And I still can't quite believe it.