But the buzz I got from the first contest stayed with me, and I ran with the concept of communicating with extra-terrestrial beings.  The contests stopped, but I kept writing to George Sampson anyway, and by August of that year had established key characters in the Senders saga:  Maud Clemens, Lucy (Lisa, Lysa, Leeza Meitner), and a ditsy me later to be named Jane Malthus.  I had also established that the Senders were seeking information, and the only way to give them the information was through broadcasting, probably derived from Ray Bradbury’s story about helpless astronauts spinning away from their spaceship, drifting through a “cloud” of Earth’s radio transmissions bearing snippets from a world they would never see again.   My letter to George Sampson in August of 1990 indicates an on-going, one-sided correspondence: