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The others members of COSFS informed us gently that there was no such thing as an all-fiction 'zine. Neither was there any such thing as a media-dedicated 'zine. So what? we replied with the zeal of the innocent. We're going to do it anyway!

Lois and I ended up writing almost the entire 'zine ourselves. Embarrassed, we made up pseudonyms for a few pieces—including stanzas lifted from Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" which could be applied to Spock. ("Art thou obdurate, flinty, hard as steel, Nay more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth . . .") Illustrations came mostly from Janie Bowers, the aforementioned younger sister, and from Ron Miller, now a pro artist. Intent on doing it up right, we paid to have all the illos electronically etched. More shaking of heads among the COSFS members.

We typed every word ourselves, on long sheets of waxy purplish paper, and, since neither of us were skilled typists, became intimately acquainted with correction fluid, or "corflu."

Bribed by chocolate chip cookies, COSFS member John Ayotte agreed to run off our 'zines on his basement mimeograph machine. Janie's cartoon cover had too many dark areas, and stuck inkily to the whirling drum, but John, bless him, donated his own thicker paper for the covers. And so StarDate was born.

There we were, seeing our words in black and white type for the first time. Daring to air our psyches before the world. We were giddy, and not only from the fumes of the corflu.

Lois and I gathered up the precious piles of StarDate and headed down to Cincinnati for Midwestcon, our first convention, squabbling all the way over how much to charge for our baby. Fifty cents? A dollar?

Midwestcon passed in a blur. Rooms full of (mostly male) people talked at the tops of their voices. A man showed old Flash Gordon movies in a subterranean chamber of the motel. There was a banquet at an all-you-can-eat restaurant just up the way. I suppose someone gave a speech, but all I can remember is the quantities of food put away by an enormous individual rumored to be a bodyguard.

The guest of honor, Fritz Leiber, held court by the pool, but we weren't brave enough to approach him. It had still not sunk in to our feeble brains that we, too, even as women, could become Professional Writers.

I don't remember whether it was at Midwestcon, earlier, or later that we discovered the existence of another Trek 'zine, the delightful Spockanalia. Our impulse hadn't been an aberration after all—Trek 'zines were appearing all over the country. The media 'zine became a fundamental of fandom, until, decades later, most fan writing moved onto the Internet.

Within months of StarDate's appearance my family moved away from Ohio. Our 'zine was doomed to be a one-shot; the name was later picked up by someone else. Lois went to her first Worldcon, in California, without me. But she sent me a present, a chalk-on-velour portrait of Engineer Scott. The package arrived on my doorstep borne by a very amused postman—all over the wrapping paper Lois had written exhortations to Handle with Care. "Oh yes," my mother told him with a patient sigh, "that's from my daughter's little friend."

We survived adolescence, only to confront adulthood. But we still had science fiction. And we still wrote.

One evening, as my infant son—who was born on a Friday the thirteenth—crawled over our feet, Lois told me of a story she'd been toying with: a Klingon officer and a redheaded Federation scientist (the latest in a long line of redheaded heroines) are stranded together on a planet resembling the African plains which Lois had recently toured. . . .

The years passed. Lois, too, gave birth to a son on a Friday the thirteenth. Then, one summer, soon after I'd made my first professional sale—proving that it was, amazingly, possible—she arrived at my house with the manuscript of her first novel. We sat until the wee hours of the morning crossing its t's and dotting its i's. Like a medieval alchemist she'd taken her germ of an idea, mixed in Ignatius Loyola, Winston Churchill, and Dumas's