alison
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
Hello! A couple of questions ago you mentioned A Warrior's Apprentice as one of your evergreens, having never won awards (among some other criteria), which I'm so shocked by! I read it in high school and one of its lines is now memorialized as my senior year quote (too embarrassed to say which one). I've now graduated from college and still go back to it every year. Thanks for writing it all those years ago <3 [?]
Lois McMaster Bujold
You are welcome!
I was, I think, too new in the marketplace at time time (1986) for the book to have attracted notice from enough readers for an award. The Hugo award for The Vor Game, a couple of years later when I'd gained more visibility, was something in the nature of compensation, I feel. And the Nebula for Falling Free I attribute in part to its serialization in Analog Magazine, which brought it before a lot more reader-voters than might have encountered it otherwise. Awards are very much an intersection of skill, work, and luck -- the skill and work, which are under a writer's control, are required to put one in the pool that luck, which is not, may fall upon.
What's important, then and now, is that the book is still finding readers, which I'd always felt was the main utility of winning an award, one more bit of advertising. If the work can find its readers without same, that's just as good.
Ta, L.
I was, I think, too new in the marketplace at time time (1986) for the book to have attracted notice from enough readers for an award. The Hugo award for The Vor Game, a couple of years later when I'd gained more visibility, was something in the nature of compensation, I feel. And the Nebula for Falling Free I attribute in part to its serialization in Analog Magazine, which brought it before a lot more reader-voters than might have encountered it otherwise. Awards are very much an intersection of skill, work, and luck -- the skill and work, which are under a writer's control, are required to put one in the pool that luck, which is not, may fall upon.
What's important, then and now, is that the book is still finding readers, which I'd always felt was the main utility of winning an award, one more bit of advertising. If the work can find its readers without same, that's just as good.
Ta, L.
More Answered Questions
Stgermain
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
As you've gotten older, wiser, and perhaps a more capable writer, do you look back on things you wrote early in your career and wish you could change them? I once saw an interview with Spielberg about Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He talks about how he could never have had Richard Dreyfus' character go off on the space and leave his children behind, if he'd made the movie after he became a father. Thanks.
Sybal Janssen
asked
Lois McMaster Bujold:
Finished "The Hallowed Haunt" today and am starting to reread it. Your Five Deity theology fascinates me. I was particularly taken with the idea the thumb, which represents The Bastard God touches all five fingers. Did you develop this theology completely from your own creative imagination, or was it a partial not to the five elements of the Ancient Chinese world view? Much else of your theology delighted me.
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