My Last Photo

I don’t take many photos anymore. I must choose how to spend my time and photography ended up on the bottom of the list, even though I have a great Nikon and some awesome lenses. Writing was on the top.

When I do take photos, it tends to be in clusters. Every now and then I’ll do a screen capture of something that’s important to me. The last photo I snapped was with my phone. It was indeed a screenshot and it was inadvertent. I was practicing how to take a screenshot.

Before the big reveal, I have two things to tell you.

Thing one, I am not good at promoting myself. I am an introvert and nothing makes me run faster than, “Sooo, tell me about yourself,” or “Give me the elevator talk about your book.” This will make sense in a few paragraphs.

Thing two. I like science fiction. My mom likes science fiction. My brother likes science fiction. My dad did not. “How can this be?” you may wonder. I know, I couldn’t wrap my head around it either!

When I asked him why, he said, “It’s all bug-eyed monsters!”

Well, of course it’s not!

When I asked my mom what was her biggest pet peeve about science fiction, she said, “All those dumb writers that think bug-eyed monsters are science fiction!”

Well. I wrote a short story about aliens that were not like humans. It got published! I was utterly thrilled. Guess what photo went with my story? Oh yeah. Clearly the editor did not share the same ideas as my mom.

You can see the picture (and my story) at Teleport Magazine.

The prompt for today was “the last photo you took”. If we’re talking about random chance, there was a 1 in 8,000 chance that I’d pick this photo. I have 8,000+ photos in my Google account. A paltry amount compared to how many I’ve taken over my lifetime. Dare I say, a 1 in a 1,000,000 chance of picking it? So. Thank you for helping me to promote myself, introvert that I am.

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