When Toni Weisskopf told me Baen Books was going to reissue Oath of Swords in a trade paperback format, I thought that was a good idea. When she told me she wanted me to write a foreword for it, I thought that was a good idea. When she told me she wanted me to write a foreword for it and give her a new short story set in Bahzell's universe, I thought that was a good idea, too. Of course, that was before I discovered just what my writing schedule was going to look like this year. I still think they're all good ideas, but my life's turned out to be just a bit more . . . interesting, in the Chinese sense of the word, than I anticipated it would.

That happens to me a lot. Ask Sharon, the mother of my children (whom I see from time to time, when I emerge from my writer's garret in search of sustenance).

But that lay in the blissfully unknown future when Toni first proposed this whole idea to me, so I happily added it to my plate, little guessing just how heaping a helping I had loaded there. And, in a spirit of happy creativity, I asked Toni what she'd like to see in a foreword.

"Well," she says to me, "I think you should consider keeping it brief."

"Brief?" says I. "What are you trying to say, Toni?"

"Well," she says, "your last two or three novels have all run to 300,000 words . . . or more."

"And your point is?" says I.

"Never mind, David," she says.

I'm still trying to figure out exactly what she was getting at.

On a more serious note, and a somewhat sadder one, the decision to reissue Oath of Swords was actually made by Jim Baen before his death. I started to say before his "untimely" death, but that, of course, would have been redundant. There really wasn't a time when we could have lost Jim which wouldn't have been "untimely." I miss him, as a professional colleague, as a mentor, as my publisher, and as my friend.