What's in a name?

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 lived in different stories." So Heinlein aficionados will recognize not only Peewee Reisfeld, from 1959's YA classic Have Spacesuit Will Travel, but The Long Watch's John Dahlquist, among others. It's a great anthology, whether you're a fan of Heinlein and Golden-Age SF or not.