The Vorkosigan Companion (6 page)

I introduced you to SF and fantasy, and you introduced me to history and archaeology. This was the early 1960s, and American television was filled with World War II shows. It was all around in the culture. We shared books like
Escape from Colditz
, which was about WWII prisoner of war camp escapes in Germany. I think it is because we were trapped in high school and the idea of breaking out of the prison camp was a very captivating idea. "Maybe if we dig a tunnel we could get out of the classroom. . . ."

LSC: One of our history teachers was a big fan of the movie
Stalag 17
, so I suppose the thought of breaking out wasn't exclusive to the students. I well remember writing a brief piece where I was magically transported from the crowded halls of the high school to the Pelennor Fields, hearing the horns of Rohan in the dawn.

LMB: My Tolkienesque epic, embarked upon at age fifteen and never finished, at least has the dubious distinction of having been written in Spenserian verse, the result of having read
The Lord of the Rings
and
The Faerie Queene
twice that year.

LSC: It was you who introduced me to Tolkien, something for which I'm profoundly grateful.

LMB: I bought an Ace pirated edition of
The Fellowship of the Ring
on a family vacation to Italy, and found the ending to be a huge disappointment; it just sort of trailed off. Oh, lord, I thought, it's one of those darn dismal British writers. . . . There was nothing on the cover, spine, blurb, nor after the last page that indicated there was more, except for a brief reference buried at the end of the "about the author" paragraph to it being a heroic romance published in three parts. Marketing was more primitive in those days, I suppose.

Half a year later, it was with overwhelming joy, still remembered vividly, that I found its two sequels. I don't remember the names of most of my high school teachers, mind you, but I can still remember where I was sitting when I first opened up
The Two Towers
and read, with a pounding heart, "Aragorn sped on up the hill . . ." My father's home office, the air faintly acrid with the scent of his pipe tobacco, in the big black chair under the window, yellow late-afternoon winter light shining in through the shredding silver-gray clouds beyond the chill bare Ohio woods to the west. Now, that's imprinting.

The chair, the room, the man, the world are all gone now. I still have the book. It has stitched itself like a thread through my life from that day to this, read variously, with different perceptions at different ages; today, my overtrained eye even proofreads as it travels over the lines, and sometimes stops to rearrange a sentence or quibble with a word choice. Is it a perfect book? No, doubtless not. No human thing is. Is it a great book? It is in my heart; it binds time for me, and binds the wounds of time.

"And he sang to them . . . until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness" is no bad epitaph for a writer. I could crawl on my knees through broken glass for the gift of words that pierce like those.

LSC: It grieves me to hear someone say, "I don't have to read
The Lord of the Rings
, I've seen the movies"—even though the movies are amazing accomplishments. And had the side effect of allowing us to get back in touch with our inner fan-girls.

LMB: It all comes back around, doesn't it? I tried sporadically to write through early college, but then got sidetracked—although there was a period during college when several of the members of the local SF club I'd discovered (in Columbus, Ohio) met at the house of a graduate student in English Literature who was himself trying to become a novelist, and who eventually succeeded, too. He went on in academia—I ran into him again a few years back at a con.

LSC: Then my family had moved to Texas. We didn't see each other for five years, during which time real life overwhelmed the murmurs of our muses.

LMB: Ray Bradbury, in a speech he gave at a Nebula banquet in the late eighties, told a tale of having one day decided he needed to "grow up"; endeavoring to put away childish things, he burned his comic book collection. About a month later, he woke up to himself and said, more or less, "What have I done?!" I was a slow learner; it took me about a decade to find that lost real self again. I married, worked for several years as a drug administration technician at the Ohio State University Hospitals, and finally had my two children.

During that same period you'd had your kids and began writing again, and made your first short story sales. I'm half-willing to swear that there's something about completing one's family that frees up women's energy, as though we're subconsciously holding something in reserve till then. Stuck in a small town with two preschool children and no job (or rather, no money—don't get me started on how our society devalues "women's work," or I'll still be ranting come sunset), I was inspired by your example. It seemed to me this might be a way to make some money but still get to stay home with my kids. Which eventually proved to be true, but it took a good long time getting to that point.

LSC: How did you get started?

LMB: I count the beginning of this effort as Thanksgiving Day, 1982, when, visiting my parents, I wrote a paragraph or two on my dad's new Kaypro II to try out the toy. I dimly recall that the fragment of description actually had its genesis from a writing exercise done for a couple of visits to a local Marion writer's group. They were mostly middle-aged and elderly women who met in a church basement and wrote domestic and religious poetry; after a hiatus, I found them again the following year when they'd moved to a bank basement, and inflicted much early SF on them. They were a very patient, if wildly inappropriate, audience. The fragment generated, the following month, my first story, a novelette eventually titled "Dreamweaver's Dilemma," although the actual paragraphs were cut from the final version.

Later, I found a much more useful (and younger) group of aspiring writers further away in Columbus, including some SF, fantasy, and mainstream people. Another influence that certainly deserves mention is Dee Redding, the wife of the minister of my parents' church. She used to let me come and read to her from my scrawled penciled first drafts while she darned socks, and say encouraging things. Lots of people were willing to tell me things. Dee was one of the few who was willing to listen.

Even though I never did formal workshops or took a degree in literature, I still found the honest and competent feedback I needed to test and hone my skills. Which was fortunate, because no editor then or now has time to be a writing teacher.

LSC: Meanwhile, at the 1982 Chicago Worldcon, I met another new fantasy writer, Patricia C. Wrede, who lived in Minneapolis. Her first novel had just been published; I had at that time sold only short stories. She said she'd be glad to critique my work, and anyone else's I happened to know—she's teased since then that
your
manuscript arrived in her mailbox at approximately the speed of light.

LMB: The three of us fell into a sort of writer's workshop by mail, sending chapters of our assorted novels back and forth to each other for critique. With your and Pat's help and encouragement, I finished my first novel and started on my second,
The Warrior's Apprentice
.

Somewhere about the middle of Chapter 5 of
Apprentice
, in the late fall of '83, I stopped to pop out the short story "Barter." It was a side effect of reading Garrison Keillor, partly. It took only two or three writing sessions, no more than ten hours. I'd jotted the opening line in a notebook earlier that summer, based on personal observation at assorted breakfasts, without anything to attach it to at the time. "Her pancakes were all running together in the center of the griddle, like conjugating amoebas . . ."

It was easy work. The setting of "Putnam, Ohio" had been developed in seed form for an earlier tale, "Garage Sale." (Marion was a Revolutionary War general, so was Putnam, hence the transference.) The cats, the kids, the house, the Smurfs, the desperation, and the Christopher Parkening record, if not the peanut butter on it, thank God, were all lifted nearly verbatim from my life at the time.

The news of the sale came on a little teeny personally typed
Twilight Zone Magazine
letterhead postcard, almost lost in the bottom of my mailbox, which I still have. I was ecstatic. The meager money was soon spent, but the morale boost was critical to power me through the following year and third novel until my final vindication, when I sold the three completed manuscripts to Baen Books.

LSC: In tribute to your first professional sale, I appropriated your Putnam as the setting of my romantic suspense novel,
Ashes to Ashes
. I suspect the secondary character of Jan was based on "Barter" as well, in the backhanded sort of way these things develop.

LMB: Speaking of conjugating amoebas. The sales saga of "Barter" had a sequel, a success story—not to mention a cautionary tale—in miniature. The story was seen by a producer from the TV series
Tales from the Darkside
, who threw me into total confusion, in my pre-agent days, by calling and offering to buy the story rights for scripting for the show. The episode that resulted bore almost no relation to the original. Their scripter not only eliminated almost every element I'd invented and reversed the outcome, but used it as a hook to hang an
I Love Lucy
pastiche upon, a sitcom I'd loathed utterly even back in the Fifties when I'd first seen it. Since
Tales from the Darkside
didn't play in my viewing area, I've never seen the episode broadcast, a non-event I do not regret. But I was very grateful for the money.

LSC: I saw the episode. You didn't miss a thing. In fact, I had to call you and ask you if it was indeed based on your story!

LMB: Only on its title, apparently. Anyway, in the fall of 1984, I finished my second novel and started on the third, in the meanwhile sending the first two off to New York publishers, where they languished on assorted editors' desks for what seemed to me very long times. It was a difficult period, financially and otherwise, and as a get-rich-quick scheme writing did not seem to be paying off. But in the summer of '85, my second novel,
The Warrior's Apprentice
, had returned rejected. You suggested I send it next to the senior editor at Baen Books, Betsy Mitchell. Tell again where you met?

LSC: Standing in line for the bar at the 1983 Baltimore Worldcon. Although it was at the Austin NASFiC in 1985 that I suggested to her she might enjoy your work.

LMB: Your Worldcon attendances have proved awfully useful for my career, I think. So I followed your advice. That October, Jim Baen called and made an offer on all three finished manuscripts.

LSC: And you immediately called me, asking me to use my resources as a SFWA member to determine just who these people were and if they were legit! Admirable caution, considering you were tap-dancing on the ceiling at the time.

LMB: Baen Books actually started at nearly the same moment I first set pencil to paper on my first novel, and were still new in 1985, so I may perhaps be forgiven for having barely heard of them. I had no idea how long or if the company would last, but hey, they wanted my books. Through a succession of phone conversations—me bewildered and slightly paranoid, Jim very patient—I gradually learned the ins and outs of how editing was done, how royalty reports were done, how books were marketed, how cover art happened, and a host of other professional skills.

I first met Jim face-to-face in an elevator crush in the lobby of the Atlanta Marriott at the '86 Worldcon. I rather hastily introduced myself, and as he was borne away into the elevator with the fannish mob he called back something like, "If you can write three books a year for seven years, I can put you on the map!" To which my plaintive reply was—and I can't now remember if I voiced it or not—"Can't I write one book a year for twenty-one years?" I don't know if he ever knew how much he alarmed me with that.

LSC: I knew. You spent that whole convention looking like a deer in the headlights. Although it was quite obvious to me, as my friends asked me to introduce them to you, and assorted strangers elbowed past, that you were already on a map of sorts.

LMB: I was frantically trying to figure out this whole pro-writer thing. On the fly, terrified of putting some fatal foot wrong.

LSC: Which may be one reason it took you a while to realize you needed an agent.

LMB: I was figuring it out by then. I had contracted my first seven books before I acquired an agent. This was bad in the short term, in that I was really ignorant about contracts, and also had no way to reach foreign markets. But it was good in the long run, because when I did finally go shopping for an agent, I was able to make a more informed choice—and I was able to get my first pick, the estimable Eleanor Wood.

One of the things I discovered through this was that one's early mistakes need not be permanent. As new books came up, we were able to trade back to Baen for rights I had foolishly given away; in other words, we used new contracts to fix the old ones. Although this only works if one is selling to the same house, I suppose; there are also other ways early errors can be rectified by a good agent acquired later.

LSC: We've mentioned starting our families. The thing about starting them, is that then you have to live with them for years on end. It's no accident that the Vorkosigan books give a lot of importance to the role of family.

LMB: Family is a strong influence for everyone, one way or another. Either your experience of family has been good, and you recognize and relate to the emotions, or it has been bad, and you long for something better even if just in the pages of fiction. It's one of those fundamental needs built into human biology, as universal as "boy meets girl." Which also, of course, connects with family.

LSC: Many readers make the assumption that you have to sacrifice family for your art, or vice versa.

LMB: This gives me an inner vision of a writer with her family staked out on an altar at midnight, their bodies covered with cabalistic symbols, her knife raised to dispatch them in exchange for All Worldly Success. Would that it were so simple. The run on black candles would clean out the shops.