My short story "Premature Emergence" is now available in the February 2008 issue of Jim Baen’s Universe. You can read the beginning of the story here.
I wrote the first draft of this story in less than 24 hours while at the Writers of the Future workshop in 2005. Our stories needed to be based on an object we were given at the workshop and a stranger we interviewed on the street.
The object I was given was a pair of K.D. Wentworth’s glasses:
There is not a pair of glasses in the story. However, the glasses have lenses, and that got me thinking about gravitational lensing.
There is no gravitational lensing in the story. However, researching gravitational lensing led me to researching supernovas, which led me to hypernovas.
There is a hypernova in the story.
The stranger I interviewed was a homeless woman with a kitten selling balloon animals. (The woman was the one doing the selling, not the kitten.) The woman was originally from Belize, and the kitten’s name was Pepper.
There are no homeless women or kittens (or balloon animals) in the story. But you will notice a character named Beli23 and another named Pep37.