Sometimes books just want to have fun. It's amazing how liberating (I won't say easy, because writing is never quite easy) it can be to let loose and write the book that just wants to be a big queer happy space romp—not to mention discovering that other people want in on that party, too. I'm so grateful to the wonderful team at Interstellar Flight Press, editor extraordinaire Holly Lyn Walrath and Michael Glazner, for embarking on this trip with me and for doing the hard work of providing a flight map along the way.
There have been so many people who helped with reads and critiques along the way, including the wonderful Codexians (go team BB-8!) who read the first draft; my VP22 classmates Alice Towey and Kaitlyn Zivanovich, who helped me wade through rewrites; Julia Patt, and of course the splendid Bennett North, who is a thoughtful external editor as well as a reliable voice reminding me when to turn off the internal one.
I also owe big thanks to the proofreading crew at Interstellar Flight Press—Joanna Velez, Kaylee Craig, Jeremy Brett, and Corey J. White—who had a mighty big job text-wrangling the kind of messy . . . er, sprawling world-building that I tend to generate on the fly, and to cover artist Oleg Tsoy for a fun wrapper that I hope will catch the eye of anyone judging this book by its cover.
And finally, thank you to Mr. Shakespeare, who I think would not object to a remix of this nature: thanks for these dollies to play with! It was a lot of fun to dress them up in space suits and fling them around for a bit.