The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [19]
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