The Inherent Paradox of Wishing for an Imaginary Friend

When I first met Trugo, I was eleven, and I was thinking about how I’d always wished I had an imaginary friend…

The moment that the inherent paradox occurred to me, Trugo walked up.  I was getting hot chocolate in the lobby of a hotel in Ashland, where my family was visiting to see several plays.  He was a river otter one inch taller than me and one week older who loves hot and sour soup and anything with shrimp in it.  We’ve been friends ever since.  When I don’t need him, he travels the world, but he can be back in a flash.  And he helped me finish my first novel by playing the part of Trugger.

Fiction by Mary E. Lowd Published in 2023

This has been a busy year, and I’ve had a lot of fiction published — 3 novels, 3 novellas, a short story collection,  23 short stories, and a poetry collection. Except where marked otherwise, pieces were originally published in Deep Sky Anchor or by Deep Sky Anchor Press.

Everything on this list can be read for free online at the links provided, except for You’re Cordially Invited to Crossroads Station and Hell Moon.

Continue reading “Fiction by Mary E. Lowd Published in 2023”

My Sister, the Space Station

by Mary E. Lowd

Originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, August 2023


“Will a space station — where people just live their lives, instead of doing groundbreaking scientific research — be painfully boring after having been my own glorious self, inhabiting and haunting the computers of Wespirtech?”

The people walk my halls like it’s any normal day.  Scientists work on their research.  Administrators try to balance budgets without understanding why they’re constantly coming unbalanced.  (I unbalance them.  Humans don’t know what they should spend their money on as well as I do.)  And everyone acts like it’s a perfectly normal day.

But it’s not a normal day. Continue reading “My Sister, the Space Station”

Powerful Magic

Oh god, that feeling when you’re trying to illustrate a story you wrote about one of the biggest heartbreaks in your life, but you rewrote it to have a happy ending… and when DALLE3 finally gets the illustration right, you just burst into tears because… look at it. Look at that moment in your life, all fixed, all better. And it’s just so powerful to see it there in front of you like that. Continue reading “Powerful Magic”