Well, would you look at that.

For an assortment of reasons, but mostly happenstance, the vast majority of my fiction has been published in the US, and/or by fairly small presses. As such, I think this is the only time I’ve been able to just wander into a bookstore—my local bookstore, in this case, namely the Malmö branch of SF Bokhandeln—and find a book with a piece of my work in it, just sat there on the shelves.

(The book in question is of course the aforementioned US edition of the Big Book of Cyberpunk. That story first went to print nine years ago. Time is a strangely elastic thing.)

An encounter like this makes one’s sense of one’s writerly realness that much more immediate, somehow. I suspect it has also made it rather more real for L____, for whom that part of my life has heretofore mostly been an abstract idea, and hence possibly a fiction of a different sort.