My original short story, Homecoming, arrives on brick-and-mortar shelves today, in Baen's anthology Star Destroyers. Homecoming tells (spoiler alert) the very contemporary story of a precocious, take-no-prisoners female who, against all odds, recycles a discarded warship to resettle refugees. She goes by the very not-contemporary name of Patricia "Peewee" Reisfeld. Why? Because I was stuck dead, waiting for this story idea to take off. Then I recalled how the great Robert Heinlein wrote that his stories only took off after his "characters started talking to each other." I thought, "what a shame that some of Heinlein's greatest characters never got a chance to talk to each other, because they