We had by that time also<\/em> learned our lesson regarding the submission of Liaden stories.\u00a0 Any in-Universe story we wrote would have to be a standalone.<\/p>\n Jethri kind of wandered into my head, as characters tend to do, with a tale of a swindle so breathtakingly nuts, it had to be brought out into the open. I brought the kid to the table, Steve agreed that it could fly, and — ta-da! — I was lead on the short story, which was published in Absolute Magnitude #11<\/em>, in May 1999.\u00a0 We were somewhat stunned to see A new Liaden Universe story in this issue<\/em> on the front cover.<\/p>\n Moving on …<\/p>\n In 2002, I was serving as SFWA president, having invested four previous years as executive director and then vice president of the same organization.\u00a0 In retrospect, running for president was not the best plan I’d ever had.\u00a0 I was at that point not only beaten down by stupidity and SFWA in-culture, but also, unbeknownst to me at the time, laboring with a severely under-achieving thyroid, which meant I had a hard time thinking, and even staying awake.<\/p>\n Aside from all of that, we owed Meisha Merlin a book.<\/p>\n Steve and I sat down and we — looked at each other.\u00a0 I Dare<\/em>, the last of the seven-book contract, had been published in February 2002.\u00a0 We were reading for Low Port<\/em>, Steve was pushing an expansion of SRM Publisher, SFWA president was eating up a lot of time, and I was ill.<\/p>\n Neither one of us had given adequate thought to what we were going to do after I Dare<\/em>.\u00a0 Finally, Steve said, “Could do something off the edge of the universe, or back in time, or –”<\/p>\n “Jethri,” I said, and he squinted at me, then nodded.\u00a0 “That would work, if you want to take it.\u00a0 You know the characters.”<\/p>\n Which is how I became lead on Balance of Trade<\/em>, the novel.<\/p>\n It says on the story card that we sent the completed manuscript to Embiid (our brand-new electronic publisher) on October 1, 2002, to Meisha Merlin on October 4, and returned revisions to Meisha Merlin on December 29, 2002.<\/p>\n Low Port<\/em>, the anthology we edited, was published in 2003, instead of a Liaden novel, and Balance of Trade came out in February 2004; mass market rights sold to Ace; subrights sold to the Science Fiction Book Club for the November 2004 catalog.<\/p>\n To the summing up<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In mid-1997, I was hired as the first full-time Executive Director of the then-called Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Sometime later in the year, Steve and I were, I believe, invited to submit a Liaden story to Absolute Magnitude magazine. The reason I think we were invited was because we had pretty much … Continue reading Balance of Trade Intro<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2142","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/splinteruniverse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/splinteruniverse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/splinteruniverse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/splinteruniverse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/splinteruniverse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2142"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/splinteruniverse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2152,"href":"https:\/\/splinteruniverse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2142\/revisions\/2152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/splinteruniverse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/splinteruniverse.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Balance-of-Trade-cover-scaled.jpg\")
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\nBalance of Trade<\/em>, by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, Meisha Merlin, February 2004, Cover by Donato.<\/p>\n