seeing stars

I just got word that “L’Aquilone du Estrellas (The Kite of Stars)” has been selected to appear in another anthology – Strange Horizons: Best of 2003, published by Lethe Press.

Strange Horizons, of course, is where the story first appeared, and I am very happy to be included in this book.

This little story has done amazing things for me, and I am stunned yet again by the way things work out.

Just the other day, I got a letter from a visually-impaired political science student at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila (his computer is outfitted to read aloud for him). He wrote that he’d been following my work prior to his eventual blindness and found “L’Aquilone” over at Strange Horizons.

As an aspiring poet and fictionist, he plans to produce some writing himself, not letting his state of blindness deter him from his dream of being a writer. He thanked me and called me an inspiration, filling my heart to near-bursting.

I wrote back and told him that it was the other way around.

It is readers like him who make the entire act of creation worthwhile. Not for the accolades or praise, but simply because for a moment, my words became all his.