This is a lark of a story, that I wrote to entertain myself after finishing a novel. The fact that you can always sell humorous science fiction had nothing to do with it.
I like the local-color humorists of the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries, and it occurred to me that I’d never seen a science fiction local-color story. Perhaps because it’s basically a silly idea. At any rate, I was stuck in another damned Iowa winter, feeling homesick for Florida, and so I wrote this.
Sent a copy of it to a friend who is a sensitive poet with many degrees and an accent you could slice and serve up with red-eye gravy, asking him whether the dialect rang true. He wrote back that he thought my family must have had a Southerner in the woodpile. Whether that’s a yes, or no, or a sometimes, I’m not sure.