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rolanni...it might take us a bit to actually get them on the air, but hey! That's the kind of home-grown service you can come to expect from a one-woman station broadcasting from the Interior of Maine!
'way back in October![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
difrancis made the following request:
I have always wondered how you and Steve started writing the Liaden stuff
together, and how the early process went and how it goes now.
Steve and I set up housekeeping 'way back before the rocks cooled. He was the elder writer by manymanymany articles, reviews, and stories. I had an extremely active fantasy life, a first place win in the BaltiCon Short Story Contest, and a desk drawer crammed full of 200-500 word "stories" (I don't talk much in Real Life, even less then than now, and hadn't yet figured out that writing isn't anything at all like talking, except when it is).
Very shortly after we got our cats and our books settled into one apartment, a kind friend lent us the use of his beach house for a week. Off we went, full of, um, creative energy, a portable typewriter, Scrabble, and a bottle of Bogg's Cranberry Liqueur among our baggage.
One early morning, as we were finishing up a bottle of Boggs and our third, sixth, or twelfth game of Scrabble, I laid down the word "decat." Steve considered this for a moment, then asked what somebody would have to do in order to be "de-catted." I explained that "decat" was a technical term, used to describe the set of ten beads on a rosary (yes, it's misspelled; this was Scrabble). He accepted the explanation and the word, but the question of what terrible crime would carry the punishment of de-catting stuck. Next morning, I hauled out the portable typewriter and wrote the rough draft of "A Matter of Ceremony," which would become my first published short story.
And that was the murky beginning of our collaboration.
Other collaborations followed, some by accident, like the Kinzel stories; others, like "Candlelight," more deliberately. We got used to bouncing ideas off of each other, and working out the knotty bits as a team.
So it wasn't at all unreasonable or unusual for me, after a day of hard typing and many pages torn from the typer and hurled in the general direction of the trash can, to lay a sheet of paper before Steve on the kitchen table, and say, "I think this is a novel."
On the sheet was a single sentence: The man who was not Terrance O'Grady had come quietly.
Steve considered this awhile, sipping his wine, and eventually allowed as how I was right. Then, he asked me who my character was.
As previously reported, I had brought an active fantasy life with me into the partnership. And it happened that I had worked with two rather dashing characters for many years, and knew them well. So I spent the rest of the night and into the wee hours of the morning telling Steve about Val Con, Miri, and the universe they lived in.
When I ran out of steam, and wine, he said, "I was wrong. It's not a novel. It's seven." Then he got a pad of yellow paper and we right then mapped out the seven stories in the Agent of Change arc. Sometime during that, I left the table for a few minutes to call in sick at my job, and sometime along mid-afternoon, we went to bed.
Next day, I started writing Agent; it took all of a month to finish the first draft, and consumed most of our waking hours. We talked story points in the grocery store, role-played scenes at breakfast, argued motivation in bed.
At one point, I felt we needed to introduce a member of what I called "The Green People," not-very-well-defined characters from my fantasy life whose sole purpose was to speed up the story when things got slow by doing something "alien" and incomprehensible. Steve took that idea, married it to "Honest John," a character of his own who was sore in need of employment, and so the Clutch were born.
We submitted Agent to Ace, where Ginjer took eighteen months to reject it with, "But it's like...John LeCarre in space!" and then to DAW, where it was rejected by return mail, and then to Del Rey, which emitted a Deep and Vasty Silence for a number of months before we got a phone call from Steve Hickman, who had been commissioned to do the cover art, asking if we could send him the rest of the manuscript so he could find out what happened. A couple days later, we got the contract in the mail.
By that time, we'd already finished and submitted Conflict of Honors.
End side one. See you on the flipside
'way back in October
difrancis made the following request:I have always wondered how you and Steve started writing the Liaden stuff
together, and how the early process went and how it goes now.
Steve and I set up housekeeping 'way back before the rocks cooled. He was the elder writer by manymanymany articles, reviews, and stories. I had an extremely active fantasy life, a first place win in the BaltiCon Short Story Contest, and a desk drawer crammed full of 200-500 word "stories" (I don't talk much in Real Life, even less then than now, and hadn't yet figured out that writing isn't anything at all like talking, except when it is).
Very shortly after we got our cats and our books settled into one apartment, a kind friend lent us the use of his beach house for a week. Off we went, full of, um, creative energy, a portable typewriter, Scrabble, and a bottle of Bogg's Cranberry Liqueur among our baggage.
One early morning, as we were finishing up a bottle of Boggs and our third, sixth, or twelfth game of Scrabble, I laid down the word "decat." Steve considered this for a moment, then asked what somebody would have to do in order to be "de-catted." I explained that "decat" was a technical term, used to describe the set of ten beads on a rosary (yes, it's misspelled; this was Scrabble). He accepted the explanation and the word, but the question of what terrible crime would carry the punishment of de-catting stuck. Next morning, I hauled out the portable typewriter and wrote the rough draft of "A Matter of Ceremony," which would become my first published short story.
And that was the murky beginning of our collaboration.
Other collaborations followed, some by accident, like the Kinzel stories; others, like "Candlelight," more deliberately. We got used to bouncing ideas off of each other, and working out the knotty bits as a team.
So it wasn't at all unreasonable or unusual for me, after a day of hard typing and many pages torn from the typer and hurled in the general direction of the trash can, to lay a sheet of paper before Steve on the kitchen table, and say, "I think this is a novel."
On the sheet was a single sentence: The man who was not Terrance O'Grady had come quietly.
Steve considered this awhile, sipping his wine, and eventually allowed as how I was right. Then, he asked me who my character was.
As previously reported, I had brought an active fantasy life with me into the partnership. And it happened that I had worked with two rather dashing characters for many years, and knew them well. So I spent the rest of the night and into the wee hours of the morning telling Steve about Val Con, Miri, and the universe they lived in.
When I ran out of steam, and wine, he said, "I was wrong. It's not a novel. It's seven." Then he got a pad of yellow paper and we right then mapped out the seven stories in the Agent of Change arc. Sometime during that, I left the table for a few minutes to call in sick at my job, and sometime along mid-afternoon, we went to bed.
Next day, I started writing Agent; it took all of a month to finish the first draft, and consumed most of our waking hours. We talked story points in the grocery store, role-played scenes at breakfast, argued motivation in bed.
At one point, I felt we needed to introduce a member of what I called "The Green People," not-very-well-defined characters from my fantasy life whose sole purpose was to speed up the story when things got slow by doing something "alien" and incomprehensible. Steve took that idea, married it to "Honest John," a character of his own who was sore in need of employment, and so the Clutch were born.
We submitted Agent to Ace, where Ginjer took eighteen months to reject it with, "But it's like...John LeCarre in space!" and then to DAW, where it was rejected by return mail, and then to Del Rey, which emitted a Deep and Vasty Silence for a number of months before we got a phone call from Steve Hickman, who had been commissioned to do the cover art, asking if we could send him the rest of the manuscript so he could find out what happened. A couple days later, we got the contract in the mail.
By that time, we'd already finished and submitted Conflict of Honors.
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Date: 2006-11-20 10:34 pm (UTC)Doc