I’ve always had my head in the stars.
One of my early memories is when we went to our neighbor’s back yard to watch the lunar eclipse, and to stare in awe as the moon became blood red.
As a kid, I wanted to be one of two things – an astronomer or an astronaut. Those dreams lasted into my teens, until I realized a) astronomy requires a helluva lot of math, not just staring at the heavens, and b) I wasn’t nearly enough of an athlete to be an astronaut.
I hade a brief rekindling of hope when I read about Biosphere One when I was graduating high school – how awesome would it be to spend a year or three in a simulated space station? But that fizzled too, leaving me with no way to reach those stars.
Except for sci fi.
My love of sci fi and fantasy also started young. As regular readers of this column probably know, I started reading The Lord of the Rings in Third Grade (and no, I didn’t read the Hobbit first LOL).
Then I read the classics from my mom’s bookshelf – Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, and more) and moved on to many other worlds by many other authors. I mostly found them by browsing bookstore shelves and by joining the Science Fiction Book Club.
In my twenties, I tried to become a sci fi author and failed.
In my forties, I became a romance author.
And in my early fifties, I finally made it into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) – a lifelong dream.
Now with a new website, I’m taking another step toward my dream of the stars.
Mark and I have just launched an author-driven speculative fiction directory – LimFic.com. In the works for three years, it’s a great place to find all kinds of spec fic books, from romance to hard sci fi, and across the character spectrum, like those old bookstore shelves but ultimately with so many more choices when it’s built out. And so many ways to search them.
Folks in the queer romance community will recognize the format of the new site. It works just like QueeRomance Ink, and will have many of the same features.
It’s been a long journey from my Mom’s personal sci fi library to Waldenbooks to here. I hope you enjoy the result.
I’m now closer to the stars than I have ever been.