Last week, I wanted to link someone to my story on Luna Station Quarterly. There were various ways I could have retrieved the link but - being rather lazy - I simply Googled for my name and the story’s title.

Rather surprisingly, the actual story doesn’t show up in the first page of Google’s results. My interview with LSQ does, as does my own overly-excited blog post about its publication.

What I did find (third result on the page, no less) was a review. A review! Someone whom I don’t know read and reviewed my story!

I clicked on through without considering whether I really wanted to know what an unknown internet denizen had to say about me or my words. After all, sometimes the internet is not a very kind place. As it turned out, the review was perfectly civilised and seems to be by someone who spends a huge amount of time tirelessly reviewing short fiction.

Publishing my first story felt like such a big deal to me that it’s hard to accept that it was an invisibly, unnoticeably tiny drop in the fiction-swamp to the rest of the world. Finding a little bubble like this to mark its presence is as lovely as it was unexpected.

You can read the review on SFF Reviews.