There were causes for this, and one of the most important was Anne McCaffrey. One of the most important reasons was her hard-earned popularity. Other women writers may get more academic attention, but Anne hit the New York Times list with a hardcover SF novel (The White Dragon, 1978), one of the first SF writers to ever do so. I can (nowadays) just picture the response in the SF editorial community—“Hey! Rival publisher has a best-selling woman writer! Why don’t we have a best-selling woman writer?” followed by a sudden reevaluation of their slush piles. Anne’s pioneering on the awards front was vital, but it is sales that allow publishers to stay in business—and to take chances on new writers.
As a very young reader, to me writers were represented at most by a few not-very-illuminating biographical lines in the backs of the books. Books themselves seemed to come out of the walls; there was no authorial or critical barrier between me and what I had not yet learned to call “the text.” It was all the story, then, seeming to bloom spontaneously in my mind’s eye as I read. Writers were distant figures, not connected in any way to my everyday world. This started to change for me when I discovered SF fandom and the convention scene soon after high school. My first SF convention was Marcon, in Columbus, Ohio, in 1968. Even then, writer guests of honor were still rather distant, up on podiums or panels that I seldom made it to. (Although I came within inches of first meeting the young Robert Silverberg in a somewhat crowded convention motel swimming pool in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, circa 1970, by not quite accidentally kicking him in the head. I’m sure our later first meeting, whenever it was, was much better.) My fling with SF fandom in this period was brief, running perhaps four years all told, but it gave me knowledge of a major go-to resource a decade and a half later when I came back as a wannabe pro.
I’m afraid I missed most of the ’70s and the early ’80s in SF, just the period when Anne’s career was building up. I was put off SF by the dreary dystopian turn it took into the New Wave and abandoned the genre in favor of mysteries, romance, general fiction, and boatloads of nonfiction. A somewhat too-early marriage (didn’t seem like it at the time—twenty-one was as old as I’d ever been) diverted me out of college and into the workforce, and I lost track of wanting to be a writer. But a job in patient care at Ohio State University Hospitals and a staff card that admitted me to the university library’s main stacks gave me both original life experiences and a new breadth of reading that were to pay off later.
From the mid-’80s, I was back in the SF scene, this time as an aspiring, and soon actual, pro, thanks to Baen Books picking The Warrior’s Apprentice out of their slush pile. My next brush with Anne came through Baen, who evidently brought my books to her attention; they, and I, received a most valuable promotional blurb from her. (Although I do have a memory, totally disassociated from its context, of having a writer-guests-get-together sort of lunch with Anne at some convention or another in the late ’80s or early ’90s. Her beautiful silver hair made me think she was older than she perhaps actually was.)
I was, at the time, watching older writers like a hawk in an effort to pick up tips not so much for writing, but for how to live a writer’s life—everything from dealing with contracts and tax records and royalty reports to public speaking to managing one’s time and space as a self-employed person. My particular quirk in the late ’80s was office-envy. I didn’t have room for a home office in my house back then; my tasks were carted variously around from the back of my dining room to my kitchen table to my living room or bedroom to the couch in front of the big window at the Marion Public Library, as chance permitted. So in greenroom conversations and the like when I met colleagues, I often ended up asking them to tell me all about their home offices, rather like a person on a diet asking someone to describe their dessert. Roger Zelazny and Anne both stick in my mind as mentioning that their home offices looked out upon mountains, a tidbit which, in Anne’s case, must have come from that convention lunch. (I never imagined that I might someday see her work space.)
The marketing idea of “sharecropping” popular SF universes was just getting rolling in those days. New and hungry young writers were frequently targeted as junior partners for these arranged marriages. Sometimes, as in publisher Jim Baen’s case, it was also a ploy to bring new writers to the attention of a wider audience and turboboost their careers, a hat trick he subsequently pulled off several times. Sometimes, I’m afraid, it was just because new writers were cheap. My first such invitation was to write for a YA line in an Asimov robots-universe series, an offer I found very flattering then, but, by luck or some dim sense of self-preservation, turned down. The next such invite was a lot harder to say no to.
I was, as I recall, on a family vacation to my brother’s place at Lake George, NY, (therefore midsummer, though I don’t now remember the year) when someone at Baen caught up with me with a proposal to be the junior writer on an expansion of Anne McCaffrey’s Planet Pirates series. This was not one of her books I’d previously read; I think there may have been a quick dash to the closest B&N, an hour’s drive away, for a cram course. I looked very seriously at the proposal for a week or so, trying to think my way into it, but it was in competition for my very single-track brain space with my own work in progress, so I at length took a deep breath and turned it down. (If it had been in the Ship Who Sang universe, a series expansion Baen took on later, they might well have had me.) In any event, the project went to Elizabeth Moon, which she later mentioned was a well-timed break for her as her own original creativity had hit a downturn at about that time due to difficult family obligations. And the book that I would have set aside was one that went on to win a Hugo Award for best novel. So that was better for both of us. (Elizabeth’s collaborative work gained her some striking covers, though.)
My next encounter with the McCaffrey clan was the result of a string of random chances. Being still in the, so to speak, financially challenged phase of my writing career, I sought a roommate to split costs with for the fiftieth Worldcon in Orlando, Florida, in 1992, and ended up with a friend of a friend of a friend whom I had never before met (the chain actually went like this: Lillian Carl—Pat Anthony—Pat Anthony’s writing group). Barrayar was up for a Hugo for best novel that year, and I was in the usual temporarily insane and wholly distracted state of mind, which that experience tends to engender in hungry young nominees. Since I had no other guest, I invited my roommate, an aspiring writer, along to the Hugo ceremony. Todd McCaffrey was also there on his mother’s behalf for her nomination for All the Weyrs of Pern. He did seem enviably calmer than I was, though I expect he, too, had the Schrodinger’s-cat problem of holding in mind coherent acceptance remarks that one might or might not be called upon to deliver.
As it chanced, the rocket was bestowed on Barrayar; caught out by I-do-not-remember-what need to be in two places at once right after, I bestowed it in turn on my roommate to take back to our somewhat distant (and therefore cheaper) motel room. Todd, gentlemanly, ended up assisting her with the awkward chore, and, apparently, an acquaintance was struck up.
The next I knew of all this was when I was invited to say a few words at their wedding in August of 1994. In Ireland.
I was still in my broke phase and recently divorced, although closer to climbing up out of poverty than I could have foreseen at the time. (I have always regarded my writing income as fairy gold, not to be relied upon.) I was also in a time crunch, readying my fifteen-year-old daughter for departure to an AFS year in the Netherlands, on money mostly borrowed from her maternal grandmother. But—Ireland! Anne McCaffrey’s place! I delicately angled for an airplane ticket, stomped both financial and maternal guilt in the head, and accepted.
It was a marvelous trip, filling what had been a blank space on my mental map of the world with memories of unexpected beauty and fascinating details. A kindly neighbor down the road put me up—I still remember her hydrangeas, my first encounter with that strange litmus flower, and her Jack Russell terriers, my first encounter with that breed of dog—and
I was able to visit Anne’s house several times. You can bet I was paying very close attention. Modeling, by that time, had finally become a conscious process for me, not least because it was so much a part of how I had learned to write. How did another female writer, also divorced and towing a family, put it all together and achieve success? Such practical career-maintenance skills are not taught in any literature or writing class. What does doing life well look like?
Her place was not, contrary to fannish legend, an Irish castle, but a comfortable, rambling house built in the local modern style. (All right, the indoor swimming pool was probably not Irish standard.) Also not entirely standard, though more common in rural Ireland than around here, were the stable, arena, and pastures, although, Vorkosigan-like, Anne had clearly mastered the art of finding the most superior minions for help. Help! What a concept! (My life was very much do-it-all-myself-or-it-won’t-get-done-at-all at that point.) Also, Maine Coon cats and kittens!
The first things to seize my eye upon entering were naturally the Michael Whelan original paintings for some of Anne’s best book covers lining the hall leading onto the living room. But I did get a glimpse of her office—basically a modest back bedroom repurposed but, as advertised, looking out the window upon, if not exactly mountains, some very green hills. Also of great interest was the way she kept her foreign-publications-records file as an organized library of author’s copies, lining one whole wall of an upstairs hall/room. As is very common for writers, academics, and serious fans, her personal library overflowed into spaces and climbed walls not, perhaps, originally architecturally intended for such, but properly internally organized. Her kitchen seemed a dream of space and modernity—I’d been living in a narrow slot of a kitchen last remodeled in the late ’60s, dark and cramped and shabby in avocado and gold. To paraphrase a line from a movie, my not-so-subliminal response might be summed up: “Waiter! Bring me a life like that woman is having!”
Todd’s tales of their earlier and more straitened days in Ireland both put this success into perspective and gave me hope. An old McCaffrey family line quoted—I’m not sure if it was originally from Todd or his sister—“Gosh, Mom, wouldn’t it be nice to have pancakes for dinner just because we liked them?” rang a plangent bell. Substitute “French toast” in my household’s case.
As an added bonus, after the wedding Todd took a day to drive a carload of us around to see both some of the lovely Irish countryside, including the ruins of an ancient monastery, and to drop in on Diane Duane and Peter Morwood. This gave me a chance to glimpse yet another version of how-writers-can-live, as they were then domiciled in a fascinating old thatched-roof cottage. Peter, magician-like, conjured an excellent spicy chicken dinner for his late and lingering guests. I enjoyed the sense of a widening of my possibilities. I’d had a similar benefit from visiting C. J. Cherryh’s home in Oklahoma City a bit earlier, in 1990, when I was a guest of SoonerCon. How may writers live? How can we learn from each other how to do it better, by all measures?
It is really only in retrospect, writing this essay, that it occurs to me how much the Ireland trip had to do with my gathering the gumption to uproot myself, library, pets, and children and leave Marion, Ohio, for Minneapolis the following year, when an unexpected media-rights-sale windfall made that escape possible. Looking around, I see I have achieved the foreign-rights library, the cool paintings on the wall, and the back bedroom office looking out into green space, granted that mine is an overgrown railroad cutting rather than mountains—though I rather like the Soo Line trains, twice a day. Also, if not minions, at least I have a cleaning service every other week and someone else to cut my rather difficult lawn. Modeling. It’s how humans learn.
The trick of it is to model from the best.
I last saw Anne in person at the 2005 Nebula banquet in Chicago, where the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America honored her (and themselves) by bestowing upon her their Grand Master Award, and I carried off my second Nebula Award for best novel for Paladin of Souls. It was a most happy concatenation of events, as I thought of Paladin as very much my chick book. Grrls rule! (As my younger friends would phrase it.) We were at different tables for the banquet, so I didn’t get to talk to her very much, though I did get a chance to lean over her shoulder at one point and say, “And it’s about time!” What I remember most clearly were not her acceptance remarks—nor, God knows, my own—but how she was so warmly surrounded by her very supportive family and how Todd and the grandkids present welcomed her back to their table by a raucous shower of colorful silly string, the closest they could come to both indoor fireworks and Pernese Thread.
Because a writer’s life at its best includes balance between the professional and the personal, and Anne clearly had a knack for both.
LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD was born in 1949, the daughter of an engineering professor at Ohio State University, from whom she picked up her early interest in science fiction. In addition to her Vorkosigan Saga science fiction series from Baen Books, her fantasy from HarperCollins includes the award-winning Chalion series and the Sharing Knife series. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages.
Wen Spencer’s first book, Alien Taste, was thrust upon me by Anne McCaffrey when I arrived for one of my annual visits to Ireland. “You’ve got to read this!”
I did. Fortunately, there were already two sequels in print, so when I finished the first at some dark hour in the morning, I could snag the second off the bookshelves of the hall library and continue.
When I mentioned Wen Spencer later to some people in Pern fandom, they told me in lowered voices, “You know she started out writing Pern fanfiction.”
That was one of the benefits of writing fanfiction about Pern that no one had ever considered. It was learning this story that started the re-think on Mum’s fanfiction policy: if writing fanfiction led to such brilliant writers, then it seemed something to be encouraged (within the limits of propriety and copyright). I’m very glad to have Wen Spencer here in this tribute; she holds a special spot in our memories of Pern.
All the Weyrs of Pern
WEN SPENCER
I WAS BORN in 1963, in the literary equivalence of the middle of nowhere. From as young as seven years old, I knew I wanted to be a writer. More specifically, I wanted to be a writer of fantastic stories. The place and time of my birth, however, meant that this ambition was something on par with aspiring to be a wizard. My parents were supportive but as clueless as if I wanted to do magic.
How do you write a science fiction novel? How do you create a world other than our own? How do you make a fantastic world richly layered? How do you create and maintain conflict for the entire novel instead of just stringing together fights with monsters? My parents had no idea. My high school teachers taught me how to craft a sentence and how to type on electric typewriters (state of the art at the time). They gave me scores of famous short stories and classic novels to read. But how to actually craft a science fiction novel? They were totally ignorant of the process. My only guideposts were Writer’s Digest magazines and occasional books on writing I’d find in the library and memorize. All of these assumed that you were writing literary short fiction, not science fiction novels.
Somewhere in the mid-’70s I found Anne McCaffrey. Since her first novel, Restoree (still a personal favorite), came out when I was four, I’m no longer sure which of her novels I discovered first. I know by 1977 I had tracked down all that she had written. I can vividly remember waiting for The White Dragon to come out. I was fifteen at the time, and it was the first novel I ever bought in hardcover.
It wasn’t until the 1980s, though, that Anne changed my life.
I had spent my teenage years attempting to write short stories and submitting them to magazines like Asimov’s and Analog and Omni. The professional markets were black holes to drop stories into. Each story generated identical form rejection letters. Was I submitting anything near what you could call a short story? The badly mimeographed form letters gave no clue.
How did you move from a few thousand words of a short story to a novel? How did you create an entire other world? Nothing I could get my hands on explained the mysterious process.
I went to college and minored in English Writing. I took every undergraduate fiction class that they gave. The professors all forbade me from writing science fiction, and none of them tackled novels. Four years, and I was left just as clueless as I started. When I graduated, computers were just appearing on office desks. Word processing was in its infancy. The internet was yet to be commercialized.
I’ve watched other people write endless short stories, submit them to professional markets, and slowly lose faith in their abilities because they were beating themselves against immovable rocks. There was a chance I might have followed, eventually giving up hope on being a writer.
In college, though, I had made one very important friend. Her name was June Drexler Robertson. She loaned me her extensive collection of science fiction novels. She taught me Dungeons & Dragons. She tutored me in physics and Greek mythology. And she knew the coolest people. They were fen, as they liked to be called, using the irregular plural of “fan” to mean only one particular type of fan, a person that attended science fiction conventions.
Originally, fandom was only focused on books and mostly ignored television and movies. This was, in part, because there was so little of it. Star Trek changed that. After it was canceled, its fans were desperate for more. Largely ignored by the programming staff of regular science fiction conventions, they gathered together in the hallways to discuss their favorite shows. They started to write stories based on the Star Trek characters in what became known as fanfic and passed it around to each other. Finally they started to hold their own conventions, nicknamed by the other fens (with a sneer in their voice) as media cons. The sneer came from the fact that unlike other conventions, they were often run by for-profit companies that paid the actors of canceled TV series to appear. In 1978, the media con subculture started the fan-run MediaWest Convention in Michigan.
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