Dragonwriter (12 page)

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.

W
en 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.

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.