Since only a few people read the LWA blog and since it appears that most of you are writers I thought I'd ask a writing related question.

Has one of your fictional characters ever contacted you in real life? It's happened to me...sort of.

The main character in Free Speech and the End of the World wrote to tell me that I'd gotten it wrong. A man named Noah wrote that he'd seen how the world ends and it didn't involve copying machines.

This story isn't included in the collection, but when it appeared in Pif Magazine in September of 2001 I figured it was the most prophetic and important just because of the title alone. My one regret about "Free Speech" is that it originally included a tribute to Robert Sheckley, but the editors at Pif Magazine didn't know who he was and asked for that bit to be cut.

I still think the story is better with the Tribute.