Authors' Foreword
or
The Story of the Story
There are two short works included in this chapbook.
The first, "A Visit to the Galaxy Ballroom," is a short story that was previously published to Baen.com in November 2019 in support of the publication of the twenty-second Liaden Universe® novel, Accepting the Lance.
The second, "Ambient Conditions," is original to this chapbook. It is a novelette, and a companion story to "Preferred Seating," published to Baen.com in November 2020 in support of the publication of the twenty-third Liaden Universe® novel, Trader's Leap.
So, there's a story about "Ambient Conditions."
Understand, there's no proximate reason for this story to exist. It did not demand to be written, as some stories do. It wasn't written to fulfill a contract, or to more fully explore a particular character or situation.
Furthermore, "Ambient Conditions" is a mirror story—which is to say, it's a story we'd already written, told from a different point of view. Now, we do like to play with viewpoints at scene-length—Val Con and Miri being described as cute kids by people who have no clue who they're looking at is always good for a chuckle, for instance. But we don't write whole stories over again; it makes us feel a little uneasy, as if we're cheating.
So, why did you write this story, we hear you ask.
Well, it's like this . . .
Between handing in Trader's Leap late in 2019, and its publication late in 2020, Sharon had a mastectomy. As such things go, it was . . . not as bad as it could have been, but not much fun, either. In fact, it was a life-changing event. And life-changing events tend to take up all available processing space for quite a while. Not only was it necessary to endure and survive the physical insults of the amputation and the following radiation treatments, but there were meetings with doctors, and with PAs, and with more doctors; instructions to follow, meds to adjust to, and, and . . .
Long story short—Sharon forgot how to write. Not how to write sentences—she updated her blog and was pretty active on Facebook—but how to write fiction, which is an operation far, far more complex than merely writing sentences.
It was, particularly, the movement part of writing a story that was giving Sharon the most trouble, which she discovered after an abortive attempt to write a story set in her Carousel universe, and another attempt to write backstory for Kasagaria Mikelsyn, and yet a third attempt—well.
After the third attempt, she realized that she was going to have to deconstruct the process, and relearn how to write, one facet at a time.
This was when she hit upon the idea of using a story that had already been written as a pattern. She knew the plot, and the characters, and how the story ended. All she had to do was tell over the same action, from the point of view of the second main character in the story.
If that didn't work, she told Steve gloomily, she'd have to resort to retyping a story—or a novel—until her brain got on the case again.
Happily, retelling "Preferred Seating" from Kishara's point of view was the cure, and as of this writing, Sharon pronounces herself a graduate of the Relearning to Write curriculum.
We hope you enjoy the stories in this chapbook.
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
Cat Farm and Confusion Factory
December 2020