Sounds like a new broom sweeping clean at Baen, Gus. But to mix my metaphors here, they could be throwing out the baby with the bathwater and regret that fact very much, later. I hope you find an alternate publisher, quickly.

Gus, you did all this without an agent, yes?

I don't know whether Tor is looking at unagented stuff, but if you're willing to wait about ten days, I can find out; I'll be in Anaheim for WorldCon and one of the things I'm supposedly doing is confabbing with Beth Meacham, and she's an editor at Tor.

If that appeals at all, can you email me a synopsis?

First: Toni Weisskopf was the signature over both the acceptance and the stop-order. I get the sense of hierarchies, here. Ms. Weisskopf may have no idea about me or my ... thing.

DG: I'll e-you the whole thing, if you like, with synopsis.

LMB has said she will go to bat for the thing, with a caveat that even a "brand" writer only has so much sway.

Gus, just the synopsis will do. If I can work that situation into the conversation, I just want to know what I'm talking about.

Just reviewed Tor's list. I am not sure of the fit. There may be too many "rivets" in my thing.

Hey, whatever. I'll send the synopsis. It is actually a pretty good story. They might bite.

LMB has said she will go to bat for the thing

Sweet!

As I took it upon myself to think of a remainder drabble challenge, here's a second one about "escape" I finished now:

I know people wonder about my interest in crime, scores big and small, people cutting their lives short to alter their brain chemistry beyond recognition, risk, pain and death. I’m a nice girl. I should want to know nice things. Safe things, sunny things. Somehow, being born and barely making it out with my life and living on the government’s tiny thread, sticky like a spider’s web, should make me believe in happily-ever-after, or at least that women with big hips who wear white after Labor Day should die. But, crime fiction or chicklit, we all need to escape the day to day, the part of us that writes the checks and buys the milk. In invented worlds we are free.

Alternaty

Imagine another turn on wheel of if - one where Ben Franklin was talked into staying in politics after the U.S. won independence - where he rather than John Adams was the second President of the U.S., where the tough and clever wild turkey rather than that fragile carrion eater the bald eagle was chosen as the U.S. national bird.

A world where treaties with American Indians were actually kept, so that escaping slaves had someplace nearer than Canada to run to - a world where the slavery never gained quite as much power as in our own world, and so was abolished decades earlier and more completely.

A world where we never took part in WWI, where we never had the isolationist backlash that produced prohibition, where cars continued to run on alcohol instead of oil.

And the small still voice of common sense in the back of my head says "Do you really think any one change would make that big a difference? Do you really think history forks that simply?"

Followed by the mocking ghost of Hemingway whispering: "Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?"

Love those, both of them.

Erika, my favorite line: "living on the government’s tiny thread, sticky like a spider’s web". That's a perfect description. I don't really think of you as particularly lyrical, but that one definitely is.

Gar, yours makes me think. I like that. I like the ghost of Hemingway floating after the list of simple changes.

Those were both superb.

Where is our dispenser of drabble topics? Teppy?

And, um, would anyone like to WIP-read the prologue for 7W? Because it's going to Daymond shortly.