The Vorkosigan Companion - Lillian Stewart Carl [20]
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