bounced with a form rejection. (I don't know what percentage of it

they read.) It was now late summer of 1985. My writer-friend Lillian Carl suggested I try it on Betsy Mitchell at a new publisher called Baen

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Books, because she'd met Betsy on the science fiction convention

circuit, and thought she might give it a good read and, at the very least, a more useful and informative rejection letter than the cryptic ones I'd got so far. So I did.

I never got the useful rejection letter, though. In August the book passed the first reader, in September it passed Betsy, and in mid-October Jim Baen telephoned me and offered for all three completed

books, two of which he had not yet seen. My God, I thought, after I stopped hyperventilating, a publisher that operates in real time!

(Warning to aspiring writers: this was twelve years ago now. Baen's slush piles were much smaller then.)

I then began Falling Free, as a conscious attempt at a "more serious" form of SF than Miles's "space opera." (I care much less about such labels nowadays.) By chance, during a pause in the middle of it, Betsy at Baen called me up and invited me to contribute a Miles story to an anthology of mercenary novellas she was editing, as a

result of which I wrote "The Borders of Infinity." I finished Falling

Free, then went on to write Brothers in Arms.

Miles's potential as a series character was acquiring a serious

kinetic wallop by this time. I was conscious that I was a rather slow writer by commercial standards. Both because I had very much

enjoyed the novella form, and because it would allow me to produce a book in two-thirds my usual time, I'd suggested as part of my next

three-book contract to recycle the "Borders" tale and add two more novellas to it, making an all-Miles volume. So I wrote "The Mountains of Mourning" next, followed by "Labyrinth," incidentally establishing a pattern of writing at will anywhere in Miles's timeline, and

accidentally setting up the subsequent perpetual readerly argument

of whether it is better to read the Miles stories in publication order or by internal chronology. In these omnibus volumes you are getting

them by internal chronology, by the way—until I wreck the nice

arrangement by writing another prequel someday.

I can name where many of the elements of "Mountains" came from; Fat Ninny was based on a real horse, and I share Miles's love of the semi-wild country. Ma Mattulich was an extreme version of a

certain female type I knew from real life, both victim and enforcer of her culture's life-denying mores. The river of roses might seem to