It is a small world stories

Life has a tendency to be even stranger than fiction.

I was speaking with a coworker, who is also into writing, about authors we follow and at one point I mentioned that both my parents are writers. (Now while I think they are super cool because they are my mom and dad, and they are well known in some circles, I also know they don't have the name recognition of someone like Lin-Manuel or Neil Gaiman or even J.K. Rowlings.) It turns out that my coworker follows my dad's twitter. When I told my dad it made his day. 

This reminds me of a story the late author Hal Clement once told: A once point some of his mail was being delivered to the wrong address. Something which happens from time to time, no big deal. But when he went to sort it out and get his mail, it turns out the mail had been going to the address of a former student of his. As he said he could not have written such a thing in one of his books because readers would have said that is too much of a coincidence.

I will leave you with one more Hal Clement Story. He was a regular attendee of a con that my parents helped put on. One year he said something to the fact that people should write something in the next year. So before the next year's con, I remembered and wrote something or had something from school which could work. I remember handing him whatever I wrote and could tell he was confused and gave some sort of pat "good job keep writing" thing. Later talking with my mom I learned while I heard his suggestion to write as a homework assignment to complete he probably meant it more generally and was not quite sure what to do when I handed over my story.

Bonus: The above was not the first time I heard a suggestion as a homework assignment. One year in school I thought we had to come up with a poem for class. I ended up creating a "12 days of chocolate" poem (The theme of class that year was chocolate) and then had to bring in Toblerone for the class because the kids did not believe that Toblerone was a real type of chocolate.