I grew up wanting to be an astronomer, starting when I was very young. I was raised near Kennedy Space Center and always had space on the brain. When I went to college, I discovered that I loved learning about cosmic stuff, but my internships showed me that the actual *doing* of science was not as thrilling to me. I took a fiction writing class, just for fun, while I was trying to figure out what to do about my changing interests. Discovering I loved it, I set about writing realistic stories about realistic scientists and the sorts of science I loved--pulsars, the Big Bang, dark matter, black holes. After I went to more school for fiction writing, I worked at a radio-astronomy observatory, where I ran science camps for middle- and high-school students, who were able to use telescopes to make their own real discoveries--mapping our galaxy, uncovering cold clouds of gas, measuring the Sun's radio waves. In the course of that work, I started a blog where a friend and I wrote about new scientific discoveries in our fields. It was through that hobby that I realized writing about *true* science--science journalism, or science communication--was a job.