Some more about the sale to Baen’s Universe
Now that I have a little spare time, here are more details:
If all goes according to plan, “Premature Emergence” should appear in the February 2008 issue of Baen’s Universe.
The response time on the submission was one year and one day — which is not the longest I’ve had. Baen’s was overstocked with stories, so last year they put a freeze on buying. When I was notified of the freeze, I had the choice of withdrawing the story. I’m glad I didn’t take that option! The main reason I didn’t was I felt “Premature Emergence” was just the type of story they were looking for. I guess I was right.
I originally wrote the story while at the Writers of the Future workshop in 2005. The original draft was finished in twenty-four hours. (I only got three hours of sleep that night.) Here’s a picture of me working on the story:
We had to write our stories based on certain seeds: an object we were given and a person we interviewed. My object was a pair of reading glasses, and my interviewee was a homeless woman with a kitten who made balloon animals. (Umm… the woman made balloon animals, not the kitten.)
When you read the story, you will not find a pair of reading glasses anywhere. That’s because the lenses of the glasses led me to the idea of gravitational lensing and through a bunch of other topics until I reached hypernovas. There’s a hypernova in the story.
You will also not find a homeless woman with a kitten who makes balloon animals. But you will find an itinerant artificial intelligence who is making its offspring behind a balloon-like shield.
You look properly…inspired in that photograph. Possibly very tired, too (three hours of sleep? I’m starting to worry about what’s going to happen to me in August…)
And thanks for posting the origins of the story. I always enjoy knowing that when I read a story–it’s always nice having insight into other writers’ minds.
(now I have to remember that by the time the story is actually published *g* )