Author's Foreword
You may have heard about that PO Box in Sandusky, Ohio. Or maybe the one in Poughkeepsie, NY, both claimed as a prime source by professional writers in answer to the perennial question, "Where do you get your story ideas?"
In fact, story ideas are just that hard, or that easy, to get, and they come from lots of sources, not all involving a secretive special address rousted from the back-ads of Writer’s Digest or The New Yorker. In fact today there’s an easier way: just watch for what anthology editors want and then listen to your brain to see if you can hear an echo that might just be what the editor needs.
The two stories in this chapbook were both born of that last approach. In the case of "Command Decision," an anthology editor familiar with our work came to us (that would be to Steve Miller and Sharon Lee together) and said approximately, "I like what you do—can you do your take on a story that uses the phrase release the virgins as a turning point or fulcrum in the story?"
Wow, could we! Sharon and I both had ideas—and after a short confusion, we both wrote separate stories for that anthology under our own names.
There were, you understand, seventeen stories written for that anthology and each of them very different from the others. Sharon’s story, "The Vestals of Midnight," is set in her Archers Beach universe and is NOT included in this chapbook. My story, "Command Decision," is set in the Liaden Universe®, and is offered here as a reprint.
The second story, "Dead Men Dream," was destined at first for an anthology about derelicts, an anthology that will soon be published without "Dead Men Dream." That editor was looking for stories of under six thousand words, adhering tightly to theme. Sharon and I started out thinking we might be able to fit a derelict-coming-to-life story into the basic theme and length.
We discovered as we worked that our characters in "Dead Men Dream," who’d been briefly introduced in Trade Secret, our 2013 Liaden Universe® novel, had more to learn, more to say, and more to dream, than we expected. While effectively inspired by the anthology theme, the ideas for this were larger than we’d known and rather than remove three words out of four we elected to keep what we had. We wrote another story for the anthology, Derelict: "Standing Orders."
In the meantime, "Dead Men Dream" comes to you as an original story, published in for the first time in this chapbook.
Enjoy!
Steve Miller
Waterville Maine
February 2021