True Love in the Day After Tomorrow

It’s rare for a story to spring full-blown into my mind. Usually, I just get a brief glimpse of a character or situation and have to construct the story brick by brick from there. But as I was driving north to Boskone, a science fiction convention in Massachusetts, the opening line of “True Love in the Day After Tomorrow” popped into my mind:

“You didn’t believe him at first when he said he was from the future.”

And I in that instant I knew the entire story from beginning to end. I could have told it to you right then, and in fact, I did tell it to writer Resa Nelson in the lobby of the convention hotel.

I wrote the story with no particular home in mind. But when I heard that Laura Anne Gilman and Jennifer Heddle were gathering SF, horror and fantasy stories on the theme of betrayal for an anthology to be titled Treachery and Treason, I realized that the book would make a perfect home. The book was published in March 2000, the same month I was burying Science Fiction Age magazine, so its publication was a welcome reminder that I was a writer as well as an editor, something that can be forgotten when reading a slush pile of 10,000 stories per year.

“True Love in the Day After Tomorrow” was reprinted in my SF collection What We Still Talk About.