Once Upon A Time, I wanted to be a historical romance writer.  I even majored in history in college, although I dropped out of the honors program when they won’t let me write an accurate historical novel (“like Michael Shaara‘s THE KILLER ANGELS,” I said) for my thesis.  They told me I had to go to the English department for that. Well, everyone I knew who majored in English ended up teaching writing, and I didn’t want to teach, I wanted to write.  In truth, I was already writing.  I had paid much of my way through college as a freelance nonfiction writer, and in my sophomore year, I started working as a reporter for a local radio station. There—and in my history classes—I learned about the importance of accuracy, of not committing anything to paper until it was absolutely right.  Which, somehow, I took over into the fiction side. It would take me years, I reasoned, to write a good historical romance.  And honestly, I didn’t (and don’t) have the attention span for that. So I gave up and wrote science fiction and fantasy (sf/f). Because I could make it all up.  All of it—the setting, the people, the…