Mail From the ESA (or, I Am Such a Geek)

So I got a big envelope from the European Space Agency today (I got mail from the European Space Agency!). Inside was my copy of Tales of Innovation and Imagination: Selected Stories from the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury International Science Fiction Competition (which, if you want to read it, is available here in pdf format, or you can go here to try to find the appropriate link for ordering it [it's SP-546, September 2004]). Of course, I found a typo. And the formatting is the same as the pdf version, which I hoped it wouldn't be. There are no indents at the beginnings of paragraphs, so the only way to tell it's a new paragraph is if there's a lot of space at the end of the previous paragraph. I dunno what style format they were following . . . Anyway.

I'm published in a thingy put out by the European Space Agency (have I squeezed "European Space Agency" in there often enough? No? Here it is again: European Space Agency). I read my story through again (it's not very long) and it definitely has flaws, but I still kind of like it. Not in a "this is a masterpiece" kind of way, but in a fond sort of "here's a fun little trifle I wrote" way. But I realized, with slight embarassment, that I sent a story about winning an arts contest to an arts contest. But I wrote the story way before I knew about the contest. I wrote it for an Arts and Technology class I did when finishing my writing degree. I originally did it as an illustrated book (kind of a Griffin and Sabine sort of thing, in the form of the narrator's journal), then rewrote it for the contest (the orignal didn't have much middle).

I think this is my first print publication of fiction. Weird. It's not a professional publication, since I didn't get paid for it and it was for a contest, but still. It's from the European Space Agency.