This morning I was looking at pictures of book shelves over on bookshelfporn.com. I started thinking of Senator Gail Constantine’s basement library and what it would look like. She’s a principle character in my WIP, Starforgers. I have always been a bit of a bibliophile, and I knew that her character was one too. But this was a Sci-Fi story set in a time when nobody read old fashioned books anymore. Okay, maybe it was not so futuristic, but there is a sentient android in it. We don’t have those yet. Do we?
Anyway, I started to imagine Gail and her aide, a sentient android named Sumi-ness, discussing the merits of old fashioned paper books. I opened my browser to Google Docs and started a new document. Without knowing how it would end or how long it would be, I started writing. All the while, knowing that it would probably be written in the cloud and published on the web and read with browsers and e-books. In fact, this loving tribute to paper books, might never itself be printed in a book.
The story needs some cleaning up and then I get to show it to my Beta Readers next week, but eventually, it will get out to the world. It will have been the last short story I wrote in 2010 and the first new short story to appear in 2011.