Thanks! Though that's "if" it comes out; I'm not even sure who'd publish it. I'll be offering it to Baen, of course -- as they gave me my start, they get first shot at anything I do -- but I seriously doubt they'll take it. Heck, this isn't a story I *thought* about writing; looked at objectively, it may have been a waste of time as its potential audience is pretty small. However, it didn't give me a choice; if I didn't write a chapter or two of Polychrome, I couldn't write a chapter in anything else.

No, even in the original Polychrome was not a sit around and wait kind of girl. She might *SEEM* like a flighty airhead on the surface, but she was in fact very smart, capable, and perceptive. Aside from the early Dorothy, I think she was Baum's most active and effective character, in fact.

Well, in some ways it can't get too much grimmer; Oz has fallen, been devastated, and is under the iron fisted rule of magically-adept dictators.