Having said all that, the difference in the way I work with "junior" partners as opposed to well-established writers like Drake and Weber and Mackey is a continuum. There's no Chinese wall involved. I do exactly the same things with all my partners. The only difference, really, is that working with someone like Misty or the various Daves - this includes Dave Freer and well as Weber and Drake - involves a lot less "fixing" on my part. Not surprisingly, there are fewer problems to begin with, because they're much more experienced writers.

CO: You are probably most famous for your works in the series started by 1632 and you've since opened that world up to a lot of first time writers, care to talk about how that works?

EF: There's a short answer and a long answer.

The short answer is: It works very well, as the excellent sales of both anthologies (Ring of Fire and Grantville Gazette) demonstrate. Based on that, my publisher has agreed to produce at least four more such anthologies.

The long answer is that it's very complicated. To be honest, much too complicated to try to answer in a short interview like this.

CO: Any full length novels in the works either by yourself and one of the contributors to the 1632 universe, or by one or more of them solo?

EF: There are a number of novels under contract, one solo by me and the rest collaborations. As follows:

1634: The Baltic War, by me and Dave Weber. Dave and I also have contracts to do three more 1632 novels, but we haven't settled on the subject matter of those yet.

Andrew Dennis and I have contracts to do three sequels to 1634: The Galileo Crisis. Andrew is about halfway done with the first draft of the first one. Our working title for that is 1635: The Pope Must Die, but that's just a private joke. It'll have a different title by the time it comes out.

There are two immediate sequels to 1634: The Baltic War. One is a solo by me, whose current working title is 1634: Escape From the Tower. That'll change, however, because I've decided the actual escape will happen sometime in The Baltic War. Several of the characters involved, however - Julie Sims, for one - will continue to have adventures in the British isles and that's what this novel will cover.

The other sequel is a collaboration between Virginia DeMarce and me entitled 1634: The Bavarian Crisis. Virginia's already finished the first draft of this novel. In fact, I've been snippeting it lately in Baen's Bar. But we can't do anything further with it until Dave and I write The Baltic War, since some of the action in The Bavarian Crisis will be predicated on that.