461. Gods, Demons, and Retirements with Lois McMaster Bujold

[music]

Sarah Wendell: Hello and welcome to episode number 461 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell. Today, Catherine and I are chatting with Lois McMaster Bujold. This is one of those episodes where I am so excited I barely contain myself. We both read the newest Penric and Desdemona book, The Assassins of Thasalon, and if you like the Penric and Desdemona books as much as we do, you will really like this episode. We are going to talk about the origin story of Penric and Desdemona and about how her retirement partially rests on self-publishing. We also talk about how much manga she’s reading and watching, plus we have tons of recommendations.

Thank you to our Patreon community for making the transcript for this episode possible and to Laura G., Francene, Jamie, and Agnes for the questions.

If you would like to be part of our Patreon community, find out when I’m doing interviews, suggest questions, or just support the work that we’re doing, have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches. Monthly pledges start at one dollar, and every pledge keeps the show going and makes sure that every episode is accessible. Thank you, Patreon community! I deeply appreciate your support.

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In the show notes, I will have links to all of the books we talk about, and if you’re looking to try some of Lois McMaster Bujold’s work, I will have links to the first books in just about all of her series, and I will have links to all of the manga and books that she recommends as well. But let’s get started with my conversation with Catherine and Lois McMaster Bujold. On with the podcast.

[music]

Lois McMaster Bujold: My name is Lois McMaster Bujold. I’m a science fiction and fantasy writer. I’ve been publishing since mid-1980s, which is beginning to be kind of a long time ago now. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yes!

Lois: I have three or four series, one lone standalone book, and I can go on about them at length. And that, that has brought me up to whatever year this is – 2021? [Laughs]

Sarah: I don’t know what year it is either. [Laughs] Now, Catherine?

Catherine: Yes!

Sarah: Now it is time for the squeeing. Would you like to lead off with a squee?

Catherine: [Laughs] Yes! So when, when Sarah asked if I’d like to help interview you, Lois, my reaction was more or less [indistinct squee]! ‘Cause I was pretty excited.

[Laughter]

Catherine: I’ve been reading your books since the early ‘90s, and, in fact, your mailing list was how I met the internet –

Lois: Oh!

Catherine: – back in 2001 or so, or 2000?

Lois: That mailing list’s been going for a long time!

Catherine: It has, it has, and I’ve still got lots of friends from there. Some of them I’ve actually met in person –

Lois: Mm-hmm!

Catherine: – even stayed with when I’ve been traveling. I haven’t met any of the US crew yet, but it’s –

Lois: I know, know of at least one marriage that resulted? [Laughs]

Catherine: I know, I know! It’s –

Lois: Still going strong, as far as I know.

Catherine: I think, I think my, my internet experience has been much happier because of where I started it, and that’s down to you, and of course I also adore you books, so yeah!

Lois: The great advantage of writing comedies of manners is that you get fans who are into manners?

Catherine: Yeah. [Laughs]

Lois: I must say, that helps!

[Laughter]

Sarah: So you –

Catherine: I love that!

Sarah: – you have a marriage that, that originated in your mailing list?

Lois: Yeah, romance, marriage, yeah. They’ve got kids. Yeah – [laughs] – this is a long time ago.

Sarah: I, I love everything about this. I did not know email could do that, but now I, I don’t doubt it!

Lois: [Laughs] It took a while, and then meetings all around the world and many things.

Sarah: Wow.

Lois: It was fun to watch.

Sarah: So congratulations on the release of the, The Assassins of Thasalon?

Lois: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: I have been reading and listening to the Penric series, so I have to ask: is the same narrator going to return for the audiobook?

Lois: This is so new that it’s only just been submitted to the audiobooks company, so we don’t have a contract yet or any information.

Sarah: Fingers crossed.

Lois: Presumably they will take it, but, but it is too soon to make –

Sarah: Too soon to make that call?

Lois: – projections, yeah, about what’s going to happen or when.

Sarah: Now, I know that summarizing your books can be a bit tricky for you –

Lois: Hmm.

Sarah: – but what will readers find in The Assassins of Thasalon? But if you would prefer Catherine and I to summarize it for you, we can do that.

Lois: Oh, well, let’s do both.

Sarah: Okay!

Lois: My problem, well, first of all, I, I always freeze up when people ask me to describe my work, because there’s so much to say. It’s a whole novel –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lois: And the other thing is, reflecting on it, the answer changes with who’s asking the question, who’s listening.

Sarah: That’s true!

Lois: It depends on if it’s a person who, you know, knows the series, in which case all I have to say is, this picks up some threads left at the end of “The Prisoner of Limnos,” and they’re right on board, and they know what to expect. And if it’s someone who has never read a Bujold book, they’ll go, huh? You know, it’s like listening to people talk about people you don’t know at a party? [Laughs] You get off onto the characters.

This is a part of a fantasy series, started back in the, twenty years ago now, with a book called The Curse of Chalion, and I wrote three books for HarperCollins that was all set in this, what eventually became called The World of the Five Gods. It was back in the, in the mid, about 2015, so mid-whatever-we’re-calling-that-decade, I bethought myself a, of a character I wanted to explore, and he just fit right into this world, so I had a world, I had a character, I put ‘em together, all of a sudden I had critical mass.

I wanted to do an independently, indie, e-published series of novellas. No harm, no foul. You know, no, no deadline, no publisher, and I, so I wanted to write a story that was of novella length to experiment, to see if I could do an independent e-book. I’d had indie-published reprints of prior books out for years by that time.

So there are several things going on: I wanted to write that, I wanted to write a novella-length story, and I wanted to have the fun of working with a really powerful sorcerer in a fantasy world. Having decided I would use The World of the Five Gods, a whole lot of prefab worldbuilding came with, which made it easier for me.

[Laughter]

Lois: Constrained, containerized, you know, what, what kind of magic he would have and how it would work. I got to thinking about him. My original vision of him was in his thirties, forties, older, older guy, you know, powerful and assured and, and all that stuff, and I got to thinking about why don’t I start at the beginning? Because I had discovered when writing other series that jumping over material in between kind of closed off possibilities in development?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Lois: I wrote him all the way back to where he started as a sorcerer, which is a whole other story, and that became the novella “Penric’s Demon.” It was going to be a standalone, it was all there was at that time, but he kept on trucking, and there have been subsequently altogether nine novellas, and the tenth started out to be a novella, but it turned out to be a novel because there was just too much material, and that became The Assassins of Thasalon.

Trying to tell people, you know, how and where to start is tough.

Sarah: Very difficult.

Lois: I think it would work as a standalone, but I did not have anyone to test it on, so I haven’t had any feedback yet from somebody who’s read it independently of all the other, other books. That’s going to be an interesting question; I hope somebody pops up soon, you know, who has that experience and can tell me what it was.

Sarah: Well, I can tell you that as a person who has read all of the novellas, but also as a person with a terrible memory –

Lois: Mm-hmm!

Sarah: – I might be a mediocre test subject –

Lois: [Laughs]

Sarah: – and I think it works as a standalone, because –

Lois: Okay.

Sarah: – both Penric and Desdemona both fill in what’s been going on –

Lois: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – and make references to things that have happened, but everything –

Lois: Yeah.

Sarah: – that is happening is contained within the story in a way that –

Lois: Yep. It is a complete story in itself; it has a beginning –

Sarah: Yes.

Lois: – middle, and end; it does not, you know, it’s not part one of anything.

Sarah: No. There’s no –

Lois: Or part two of anything.

Sarah: – there’s no homework.

Lois: Penric, in the course of the thing, ends up teaching another person –

Sarah: I loved that!

Lois: – a lot about it, and that gave me a great opportunity to do the, you know, the newbie, you know, give the newbie tutorial again without it –

Catherine: [Laughs]

Lois: – being repeated. That’s always a problem with fantasy work –

Sarah: Yeah, everything!

Lois: – because you’re not only presenting the characters, you’re presenting the world, and the world is, in effect, another character. You read –

Sarah: Yes.

Lois: – you’re, there’s a kind of reader I suspect we three all are: we read for character. We read because we want to learn who these people are and what makes them tick, particularly, you know, in romances, but mysteries as well, and other things. So, you know, if a mystery doesn’t end up giving you the characters by the end, with some understanding of them, it’s, it’s not very satisfying.

Well, in science fiction and fantasy, the world is like another character; you expect to be, learn about it, just as you would learn about the hero or the heroine of a, of a story. If you’re writing a series, you’ve kind of got to reintroduce that world character every time, the same, only different? So that’s a thing.

Catherine: One of the things, Lois, that I, I really love about the Penric and Desdemona books is that Penric is just this fundamentally kind, accepting person, and that’s almost his superpower. I, I get the feeling the reason he can do so much with Desdemona is because he has that native kindness, you know –

Lois: Mm-hmm.

Catherine: – that’s, of Desdemona as a person, and I’d love to know more about how Penric evolved for you as a character. What did you know about him at the start, and how did he grow from there?

Lois: Ah-ha! Yeah, okay, this, this gets back to our worldbuilding again and how the magic works in this world. We have a world with five gods. They are ineffable. [Laughs] They are much larger than human. They are entities who effectively, upon death, the soul joins with them in sort of, like, union with the godhead as the, the old actual theological phrase has it. So it’s, it’s kind of important, because for life after death of the only game in town, the magic in the world stems from either the gods or the fundamental structure of the world. There’s a whole subset of magic which I call shamanism which works through the development of magical animals, and then the, the main line of magic, or what I call the sorcerers, and you become a sorcerer by contracting or being, possessing or being possessed by one of the Fifth God’s chaos demons.

So this is a particular kind of magic. It has a trend. It is, it is chaotic and destructive, but, you know –

Sarah: Yes.

Lois: – destruction can be used for creative purposes if it’s, you know, properly channeled and understood and controlled. So the temple of the world, the Fifth God’s order – we have the five gods: the Mother, the Father, the Son, the Daughter, and the Bastard, and the Bastard is, is the god of, of these demons. They all kind of belong to him and on, upon that, actually, the plot of The Assassins of Thasalon turns. So they are released into the world as little blobs of unformed chaos. They take up with an animal or a person, and they begin to absorb the personality or be imprinted by the personality of whatever creature they’ve, they’ve paired up with. So every demon in this world is different, the way every person is different, because they all have the different experience, the different upbringing, and at the end of their person’s life they can jump to another person so that they begin to pick up multiple lives, the longer they are in the world.

So the thing about Penric is that, back in “Penric’s Demon,” the first story, he contracted a demon from a very experienced temple sorceress who was dying on the road, whom he stopped to help, and her demon has the imprint of ten women, going back two centuries. So all of a sudden he has this onboard AI full of opinions.

[Laughter]

Lois: And powers, you know, which he can, you know, which he can access, but, you know, but she’s quite powerful and, in her own right, so he has to, you know, learn how, learn how best to, best to deal with her. Demons do not have gender or sex; they are formless chaos when they start. They pick that up as social learning, so this one, having been in a succession of ten women, has a very feminine personality, so we call her “her.” Among her many gifts besides a number of magical powers are all the languages that her prior riders had known. You know, that was, that was –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lois: – for me, who only speaks one language, that was wish fulfillment, you know.

Sarah: Oh yeah!

Lois: So there we go. So when I, I started off with the idea of Penric, and then he contracts a demon, and then I had to sit down and think about, okay, what’s this demon, what is her biography going back all the way? ‘Cause who she is is going to depend on who she was through all this length of time, so in the, in the first story, “Penric’s Demon,” I pretty much sketched her background in so we arrived at Desdemona, whom, whom Penric names in, in the course of the first story.

Sarah: One thing I love about The Assassins of Thasalon is that early on, you sort of, like, point out Penric’s greatest strength. In the book Penric thinks, oh, normal people carrying on with unthinking kindness must be as shocking as sudden sunlight, and I was like, well, um, yes, sir. After the few years that we have had –

[Laughter]

Sarah: – that is true; thank you for pointing that out. I mean, that’s one of the reasons –

Lois: Yeah.

Sarah: – why the Penric and Desdemona series is such a comfort read for me, because kindness is the powerful default.

Lois: Mm-hmm?

Sarah: Was that something that was conscious in your mind while you were writing?

Lois: It’s, it’s developed. It’s a thing that came up all the way back in that first Chalion novel, The Curse of Chalion. When Cazaril, the hero, is talking to a character who is asking about some dire experiences that he had, and he says that, you know, any man can be kind when he is comfortable.

Sarah: Yes.

Lois: Actually, it’s Bergon that says that. Any man can be kind when he is comfortable, but when things were horrific, you were still kind.

Sarah: Yeah.

Lois: So it’s, like, not a trivial virtue.

Sarah: No.

Lois: [Laughs] Yeah.

Sarah: No, it is not.

Lois: And it gets, you know, it gets scorned in the, in the mad rush for, you know, whatever power –

Sarah: Yeah.

Lois: – power displays, yeah.

Sarah: It’s true. Desdemona also reminds me a little bit of something that you once said about Miles Vorkosigan, that one of the other characters says about Miles: that he picks people up and he never puts them down again.

Lois: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: And Desdemona’s kind of, kind of the, the living embodiment of that.

Lois: [Laughs]

Sarah: She has picked up all of these imprints and has never put them down ‘cause she can’t.

Lois: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: And that she’s the sum of all of her lifetimes. What a very hopeful and ponderous message in character!

Lois: [Laughs] It kind of depends on the lives you pick up.

Sarah: Yes!

[Laughter]

Lois: Some of, some of those ten women are not much fun.

Sarah: No.

Lois: Rogaska is, just hated everyone, and Umelan had a miserable life in, in large sections of it, you know, so all those memories are in there.

Sarah: Yeah.

Lois: So it’s, it’s a mixed bag.

Sarah: And it’s, it’s a wonderful twist on forced proximity?

Lois: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: It’s, like, I’m a big sucker for forced proximity in romance. I love a good snowstorm?

Lois: Uh-huh.

Sarah: Like, I mean, you’re from the Midwest, right? Like, no one’s –

Lois: Snowbound cabin, yes!

Sarah: Yeah, exactly! Like, if you have heat and food, you’re not in imminent danger. You can just, you know, you can chill. You can go to Bone Town if you want to, but you’re good! Like, it’s, you’re not in imminent danger; it’s not like it’s a hurricane or a big storm; it’s just, it’s snow. It’s annoying, and you need to stay where you are. With, with Desdemona and Penric, there’s forced proximity of his brain!

Lois: [Laughs] In his head!

Sarah: Yes! He’s got, like, a team of aunties in his head all the time!

Lois: Yeah, ‘cause, yeah. The, the imprint goes up to the point where the rider or the, the sorceress, the previous sorceress dies, so he’s got, you know, these lives of older women in his head with all that that entails in terms of opinions. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yes! This –

Lois: And experiences.

Sarah: Catherine, this is a perfect time for your question.

Catherine: I was thinking that, yeah! So one thing I’ve noticed in this series is that, you know, you have several sets of characters with unusual relationship structures; sort of triads, really. You, you’ve got, obviously, Pen and Des and Nikys as sort of a triad of sort. Tanar and Bosha and Adelis, in this we see a bit more – I’m, I’m wondering, was that a conscious choice to start exploring relationships in this way, or did that just happen?

Lois: I don’t think it was. You know, if, if you look at, you know, if you went in and sort of did a statistical analysis of all the characters – it’s hundreds by now – of my work, you know, that wouldn’t be, I don’t think that there would be noticeably a lot of these, but they’re more noticeable. People notice the unusual against the background that is taken for granted? But yeah, for Penric, you know, he’s already living with basically obligate multiple personality disorder.

[Laughter]

Lois: You know? So anyone who marries him has to take the whole package or, you know, takes up with him in, in a romantic sense, and, you know, going to bed with Penric is one thing, but going to bed with Penric and these ten other women in his head is a bit of a challenge, you know, for most anyone, which is why his romances never – you know, he kept trying, but they never prospered.

But Nikys was kind of pre-adapted for him, because her mother was part of a polygamous relationship, which is, you know, bog standard, historically; nobody questions it. It’s, you know, when you have a woman with two husbands, that’s odd, but a man with two wives is, like, historically normal. So that was the household she came out of, and it was a happy household. You know, the two wives got along great.

Sarah: I love that.

Lois: So her experience with that was positive.

Sarah: Yeah.

Lois: So the idea of having to share Penric with another woman was not so bad, because she’s not even a physical woman. She’s not going to have other children, you know, so from her Cedonian viewpoint, you know, it looks pretty good!

Sarah: And you know, one of –

Catherine: If –

Sarah: – one of Desdemona’s past riders was a courtesan, so Penric’s going to know what’s up!

Lois: Oh yes, he does!

[Laughter]

Lois: We don’t go into that because, yeah, everything is fade to black, but I invite you to use your imaginations.

Sarah: Oh, believe me, we did.

Lois: [Laughs]

Sarah: Yes, that was –

Catherine: That was awesome!

Sarah: – not a problem.

Lois: He’s very expert. One of the things I never get to go into in the stories was what he was doing in his twenties when he was in Martensbridge, because as a divine of the Bastard, basically a kind of priest, which he became after he got the demon and got the theological education that’s required to go with it, one of his many duties is looking after the prostitutes of the town, both spiritually and medically.

Sarah: Right.

Lois: Which, and he made friends, and this was, like, very good for him for a while.

[Laughter]

Lois: But, so yeah, so he is, he is not, not uneducated.

Sarah: Bless his heart!

Lois: Yeah.

[Laughter]

Lois: So, so any woman who gets him is going to be very lucky, but she is going to have to, have to deal with Desdemona.

Catherine: Well, yes, I, I feel that getting Desdemona’s full approval would be, would be difficult, you know.

Lois: Mm-hmm.

Catherine: – giving all –

Lois: Yeah, that’s another thing; you know, she’s, she’s got this kind of editorial comment going on all the time. If she doesn’t like what he’s taken up with, she will make her opinions known.

Sarah: And I love how, as the series progresses, more of the other characters acknowledge Desdemona as a separate person and acknowl- –

Lois: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – and greet her and say, how are you? I trust you are well, and what does Desdemona think? And would you introduce her? Like, she is treated as a separate entity –

Lois: Are you two coming to bed?

Sarah: Yes! I – okay, I could not tell you how much I love that. Like –

[Laughter]

Sarah: – mwah! Chef’s kiss!

Catherine: Adelis’s demon-in-law, that was so sweet!

Sarah: He has a demon-in-law! Oh my God!

Catherine: Yeah!

Sarah: One of the things that Catherine brought up that I think is so interesting is that even though this is a very kind series, you have some, you have some nefarious plans for your characters, generally speaking. Catherine?

Catherine: Yes, I was, I think I was talking to Sarah. I remember back, back in, in the Bujold mailing list days, so a long time ago for me, you used to talk about, you know, when you’re writing books you think about what’s the worst possible thing I can do to these characters? And that they only get one good coincidence a book, and, but as many bad coincidences as you like. I might be remembering that slightly wrong?

Lois: Coincidences.

Catherine: Yeah.

Lois: Good and bad coincidences per book: one good coincidence, the rest are –

Catherine: Yeah. And I was wondering if that’s shifted a bit, ‘cause I feel like the Bastard’s thumb’s on the scales a bit here and there, having a bit more pleasant luck. I don’t know.

Lois: [Laughs] Ambiguous luck, because that’s the nature of their god, but, but yeah, I’m very glad you asked that question because of his, the line has been much, much quoted and much misunderstood out of context. And I’m –

Sarah: Oh, interesting!

Lois: – grateful for a chance to try to – you know, it’s the internet; nuance never flies, but let’s try. What I was trying to get at with that statement was something about how plot and character have to fit together. For a particular character, there’s a particular quintessential plot that explores that character most beautifully, completely, the way you want, you know. It shows you what you want to learn about him or her – or it, depending, ‘cause science fiction sometimes – rather than, you know, saying, what’s the worst thing I can do to this character, I think it might be better recast as, what is the most revealing thing I can do to this character?

Sarah: Oooh!

Catherine: Oh, I see.

Lois: Yeah. So it’s, it’s meant to be, you know, this, this is the scalpel by which we lay them open, you know. The plot is, plot is what you use to, you know, do exploratory surgery on a character. For every character, there will be a different, different most-revealing thing.

Sarah: Right.

Lois: It changes with every character, so it, it’s not, you know, it’s not an invitation to pile on horrors.

Catherine: No!

Lois: You know, do terrible things to your characters or pointless character torture.

Sarah: No, nonono.

Lois: You know, that is not what that was, what I was trying to get to, and yet, you know, when it gets out, you know, three quotes down the line, that’s what people interpret it to mean, and it’s not what I was trying to say.

So, there we go: what is the most revealing thing that I can do to this character? And that is where your plot will lie.

Sarah: That makes a lot more sense, rather than, let us remove the entrails of our characters slowly with a spoon.

[Laughter]

Lois: Yeah. Sometimes that’s, you know, that’s a thing –

Sarah: That works!

Lois: – you know, but not, you know, not necessarily.

Sarah: I don’t see Penric with a spoon going, all right, let’s go!

Lois: [Laughs]

[music]

Sarah: We will be right back with more of our conversation with Lois McMaster Bujold, but first Wilbur, my feline assistant audio engineer and demander of food, would like me to tell you about PrettyLitter. He’d also like the birds that are nesting in my hanging baskets to come hang out near the window, but they’re not going to do that; they’re very busy.

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And now, back to our conversation with Lois McMaster Bujold.

[music]

Sarah: Now, I have some questions for you from my Patreon community. Sometimes I will let them know I’m doing an interview; would you like to ask a question? Would you, is there something you’d like to share? So the reverberation of excitement might have registered in some sensitive computer equipment.

Lois: [Laughs]

Sarah: When I said that I was interviewing with you, people were very excited. So I have a few questions from them.

Laura G. wanted to, wanted me to tell you that she loves the worlds that you create and wants to know, how does it feel when a, ideas you had, like lab-grown meat and uterine replicators start to become real possibilities in today’s world? Do you ever look at that happening and think, all right, well, I’m going to play the lottery today, ‘cause seems I’m good at this?

Lois: [Laughs] The, both those examples were not things I made up. They were, like, already common furniture in the science fiction genre. Uterine replicators go back at least to Aldous Huxley in 1932 with Brave New World –

Sarah: Wow.

Lois: – but he, he used them basically as a metaphor for the British class system, which is not what I do with them at all. You know, you take the technology and do something else with it. Vat meat, the idea of vat meat has been around forever. There’ve been all kinds of stories about it.

So that’s, you know, that was, that is just, you know, genre furniture.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lois: But what you do with it, you know, you arrange it and, you know, the rest of the décor is what, what makes it work. But yeah, so, so I don’t think that I am the source of the real world development of these things, ‘cause there’s, you know, it’s all over the place. It’s, it’s in the, it’s in the zeitgeist, yeah. People are picking –

Sarah: Yeah.

Lois: – picking up the ideas.

Right, I think with respect to the uterine replicators, I have explored them more thoroughly and from more angles than any prior writer who tends to – particularly male writers tend to use them as kind of a throwaway thing to get out of having to deal with all that messy biology.

Sarah: Chickens.

[Laughter]

Lois: So yeah. So it’s, it’s fascinating to watch. It’s, you know, some of it is coming along faster than I thought it would, which is good, ‘cause I’ll get to see it.

[Laughter]

Lois: I’m kind of interested. But I did not, I cannot claim the invention of either of those two ideas.

Sarah: Right. Francene asked me to pass along that, you’ve worked with traditional publishers, and with the Penric series you’ve been self-publishing. What advantages do you see in self-publishing as an author, and is there a reason why Penric and Desdemona worked better as a self-published series? She also asked that I say, thank you for all your wonderful worlds. They are compulsively readable, and whenever I need to go somewhere else for a while, your books are the perfect vehicle. Can confirm.

Lois: That is, that is good, you know? My, my ideal is somebody finding my books something they can read while sitting in a hospital waiting room, you know?

Sarah: Yes.

Lois: Like, you know, that’s, and that, that is service.

Sarah: Between Penric and Murderbot, that’s how I got through 2020.

Lois: Mm-hmm. Any rate. So yes, see, the question was, again, now that it’s –

Sarah: Self-publishing.

Lois: Self-publishing. Oh yeah, I could go on at length. How much do you want?

[Laughter]

Lois: I became interested in self-e-publishing way back in 2010 when my agent in New York attended a, a conference given by Amazon to literary agents. They were trying to get, you know, content for their, this new thing, the Kindle program. Most of my work at that time was tied up in publisher contracts, but I had a couple of loose novellas that we could try. The literary agency helped me do all the technical stuff; you know, I provided the manuscript and she did the, you know, learned how to put them up, and we figured out how to do covers. You know, it’s kind of the blind leading the blind, and they did pretty well! You know, doing a lot better as e-books than the, you know, teeny-tiny amounts they were making as paper books, because, you know, they were all out of print or off the market. And I thought, that looks pretty good! Let’s try some more of this. Most of my, all of my books were available to me in the UK. I had British rights, so I sort of spent half a year going over every single one and preparing it, you know, for e-publication to go to the UK market, which was separate from the US market.

Sarah: Right.

Lois: And that was how I spent 2011, in between surgery and some other things. It was a very good thing to do, because I wouldn’t have been writing anything original at that point. Those went up, and those were doing okay. My British career had tanked several times and, you know, I had despaired of ever selling books in Britain, but the e-books sort of made a whole end run around the entire British publishing blockage, started to actually reach a few readers; you know, tiny handfuls, lot number of titles. And then my main series with Baen came up for renewal at, in 2012; a whole bunch of books had run out of license. It’s the hardest business decision I ever made, but I decided I would retain e-rights when we renewed the paper rights. But they –

Sarah: Wow!

Lois: – except for they’re allowed to sell of their own website their e-books, their edition of the e-books, but I retained the, you know, in the world, all the rest of the world was mine for my e-books. And so having, you know, already prepared them all for the British market the prior year, we got them up and started selling, and that was remarkable! I’ve never had a monthly paycheck before in my whole –

[Laughter]

Lois: – writing career, you know, but, yeah, every month, you know, we get to collate the, the e-book royalties, and they, you know, they’ve turned out to be a living wage. And then in the mid, 2015 or so, I basically reached retirement age. I knew I didn’t want to do PR anymore or book tours or, you know, all the, all the, all the stressful things that, you know, some writers relish and most hate? [Laughs] That, you know, involved dealing with the public, dealing with the publishers, dealing with deadlines. Yeah, if I just self-publish, I can write what I want, when I want, put it up or not. You know, if I don’t want to finish something I can bin it, and that looks like retirement to me. So, so that was, you know, why I tried “Penric’s Demon” and the many novellas that have followed. ‘Cause it worked really well for, you know, for being, you know, being retired and having Medicare, because I’m American and have no, you know, healthcare except what I bought off the shelf when I was self-employed, and now Medicare, now that I’m past sixty-five. So all that came together in e-publishing, and it’s been working really, really well.

Sarah: So it came along for you at almost the, almost the perfect time, and now, I haven’t looked right now because it’s evening, but Catherine, you looked earlier and said that it’s in the top fifty in Amazon right now, isn’t it?

Lois: Yeah. For some reason, the second weekend after a, one of these e-novella launches is always the best for sales velocity? So it actually hit number nineteen on Saturday.

Sarah: Congratulations!

Lois: For, for a whole hour. You know, it’s like mayflies.

Catherine: [Laughs]

Lois: But, you know, enjoy it while, while it happens. And then it, then it will settle down to, you know, about the same rate of sales of all the others eventually. It stays on the shelf forever!

Sarah: Yep!

Lois: So, you know, it doesn’t go out of print; it doesn’t go, you know, it doesn’t get remaindered; it doesn’t get shipped back to the publisher to be pulped. It just sits there and keeps selling to whoever falls over it.

When I first started in publishing, the received wisdom was that the shelf-life of a typical mass market paperback, original paperback, which was what I was writing, was two years. So if you wanted to have enough books out on the shelves to make a living at this, you had to write really, really fast and, you know, keep them coming at least a book year. Jim Baen once told me the ideal rate was eight months, a book every eight months, which about gave me a heart attack.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lois: And – [laughs] –

Sarah: No.

Lois: And I don’t have to do that anymore, you know, so it’s great!

Oh, the other thing about e-books is, coming along at the right time, is that they’ve come along just at the right time when I have worsening eyesight issues. On my tablet I’ve got, every e-book is an instant large print book.

Sarah: Oh yes!

Lois: So it’s, you know, so at a time when my reading would have been shutting down, it is opening up instead, so yay, e-books!

Catherine: Yes.

Sarah: Oh, as, as someone who has worn bifocals since she was two, yes –

Lois: Mm!

Sarah: – oh yes. I crank the text up to what I call great-grandma size.

Lois: [Laughs] Yes, that would be it!

Sarah: And it is –

Lois: I’m legitimately great-grandmas age, but –

Sarah: And it’s deeply comfortable!

Lois: Uh-huh!

Sarah: My eyes don’t hurt!

Lois: Yeah!

Sarah: I get very cranky with anyone –

Catherine: Yeah.

Sarah: – who tries to tell me that, you know, e-books are, you know, just for young people. Oh, no, no, no. Oh, no, no, no, no. I love how, for you, self-publishing and e-books arrived for, for retirement. That is just such a lovely, hopeful thing!

Jamie on my Patreon wanted to know if there would be any more Sharing Knife books. Those are some of their favorite characters and series of yours.

Lois: I’m delighted to hear somebody loves the Sharing Knife. It tends to get stampeded over in the rush for the Vorkosigans. [Laughs] Yeah. And there was a great deal of distress when it first came out because it wasn’t any of the other two series that, you know, my fault, I had addicted people to. So, and it was, it was more of a romance. In fact, it –

Sarah: Yes, it was!

Lois: Exactly! Speaking of your audience. Exactly; an experiment in splitting the attention between the romance and the fantasy aspects of a story, which sort of made it fall between two stools, but – so the, one, not quite enough romance for the diehard romance readers and too much for the, you know, for the fantasy crowd, some of the fantasy crowd. It’s found its audience. So yeah, is, will there be more? There’s nothing planned at this time. We’ve got the four novels, which are a different series structure; it’s one story in four volumes, like The Lord of the Rings. It isn’t like the Penric or the Vorkosigan stories, which are individual stories set in –

Catherine: Yeah, open-ended.

Lois: – in a, in a context. And then we have the, the codicil novella “Knife Children.”

Catherine: I liked how that, “Knife Children” just sort of, you know, tidied up a few things.

So we’ve got another question from the Patreon; this is Agnes. I think Sarah gave me this one to read because I can do the squee very convincingly.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Catherine: ‘Cause she writes – [squee] – one of my favorite, favorite favorites is coming to the podcast! (That, that was my reaction too.) Agnes says that you’re one of the authors who has the unique ability to make her laugh and make her think, sometimes at the same time, and how does she do that? And she also says that you were part of a panel on Georgette Heyer recently?

Lois: Oh yes!

Catherine: And could you talk about the influence of that godmother of romance on your writing?

Lois: M’kay! Yeah, I can, I can address the second half of this question much more easily than the first half, because I don’t really know how I do it. I write, and this is what falls out, you know.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lois: I do need –

Catherine: Right.

Lois: I do need humor and wit. It’s, you know, somewhere in there. I don’t like unrelieved dire end to end, you know, like in a, in a story that I read or that I write, so, so that’s in there. Terry Pratchett is one of my favorite writers, and he deals with some profound issues in his humor, so yeah, there’s no barrier there.

But yeah, Georgette Heyer. I go a long way with Heyer. Found her books in the early ‘70s in a remainder bookshop in Columbus, Ohio, and I was, I had read very little romance at that time, ‘cause I spent my teens reading science fiction, fantasy, and some history. She takes you to another world the way science fiction and fantasy do?

Sarah: Yep.

Lois: So that, you know, that fell on fertile ground for me, and, and of course the storylines were great, and the humor. Lot of humor and wit. Intelligent humor. So all that, all that was, was something that I really enjoyed. I’ve never, I’ve found very few other – not that I’ve explored deeply – writers that do quite the same, although Jennifer Crusie’s work in the ‘90s, you know, is, has got that same kind of thing going, that observation and the humor and the wit and, but, you know, totally different context. In there, in my, in my writerly DNA, she is one of the strands.

Catherine: I think she got a dedication in A Civil Campaign, didn’t she?

Lois: Oh yes. Well, that was my Regency romance in space. That was straight up, in the science fiction context, that was some, a romance, and it’s actually a braided novel, because it had three couples. Yeah, that was exploring a lot of the sort of Heyer-esque romance tropes, but with a very science-fictional twist.

Sarah: One of the quotes that I wanted to ask you about from The Assassins of Thasalon is the idea that life is the greatest instance of order that exists.

Lois: Mm-hmm!

Sarah: That, that everything is chaos, and life is order. Now, as someone who has been at home for a year and a half with two teenagers, I would not be immediately in agreement that life is order.

Lois: [Laughs]

Sarah: But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, well, hang on: the, the universe is chaos – I mean, even stoic philosophers talk about how the, the universe is change –

Lois: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – and life is the greatest instance of order that exists, so what a marriage it is between Desdemona and Penric, where Desdemona is chaos but has a life, and then another one and then another one. Is that part of the way you can, the way you perceive the theology in The World of the Five Gods, or is that something that has sort of evolved into this book?

Lois: It’s rooted in my whole worldview. It’s basically a biological worldview, because if you look at, you know, if you look at the universe as currently understood by science, and, you know, you have to watch that ‘cause they keep changing it on you where your back is turned –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lois: – but, but we have entropy. What we are talking about is not chaos but entropy. Entropy runs downhill. It’s, you know, it’s not something you can reverse. You know, you get, you know, things tend to disorder. That is the arrow of time; that is, you know, that is how you can tell past from future from present. So it’s built into the fundamental structure of the universe, but life breaks that by creating order, greater order than the chaos around it, the disorder, by taking in, organizing it, but it costs, it has an energy cost which is, you know, does not violate the laws of thermodynamics. You, you create more, shed more disorder than you create in your, in yourself. So life as a, as a self-replicating thing and as an evolving thing is truly amazing in terms of, you know, what the universe can do, because it, it runs in its, you know, in its little local pockets, it runs counter to entropy. And there’s a lot of background thinking about chaos and disorder and entropy in the Five Gods world that, you know, does not emerge in the stories because Pen does not have that vocabulary, but he deals with the thing all the time. So that’s what’s going on there, under-, underneath, is this biological worldview. The, the Five Gods themselves are evolving gods? They are basically made of the souls that join them; the whole world kind of created gods. It’s, they are not creator gods; it’s the reverse.

Sarah: Right.

Lois: They are an emergent property of the world. That’s what’s going on there, but, you know, not in those words, because this is a medieval-oid world and they don’t have that vocabulary.

Catherine: And that actually reminds me of something I think Cordelia Vorkosigan says in one of her books. I think you have her saying that all true wealth is biological.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Catherine: So it’s sort of a similar worldview there.

Lois: Yeah, it’s the same. It’s the same.

Catherine: Basically.

Lois: [Laughs] Exactly the same, yeah.

Sarah: Wow! Like, almost like the same person wrote them!

Catherine: I know!

Lois: [Laughs] Sorry!

Sarah: My mind is blown!

[Laughter]

Sarah: So in addition to the great and successful release of The Assassins of Thasalon, what are you, are you working on anything? Is there anything next for Penric, or are you just enjoying the release and the cruise through this next section?

Lois: Yeah, well, I’m, I just finished a book three weeks ago, you know. [Laughs]

Sarah: I love self-publishing so much!

Lois: After-dinner mint, Mister Creosote?

[Laughter]

Lois: Yeah, that’s how I feel at this point when people ask, what’s next? I am lying here in a heap.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lois: So first of all was getting through publication. Because it is a self-published e-book and because it is an e-book, you can now do something you could not do before, which is correct typos that people find that escaped me. I swear to God, there were no typos when I turned it in. They appeared, you know –

Catherine: Desdemona –

Lois: – found by the sharp-eyed fans, who I’m finding –

Catherine: [Laughs]

Lois: I keep trying to beat them, you know; one day I’m going to get there and they won’t find any, and they keep finding more. So fixing those becomes a post-publication chore –

Sarah: That’s just chaos.

Lois: – which you now can.

Sarah: That’s just chaos. Chaos demons in the book.

Lois: Yeah. Kind of, kind of going on. There’s a certain amount of PR, like what I’m doing right now.

Sarah: Thank you.

Lois: I – very minimal PR any, anymore, but this, you, you guys got a break because I’ve been reading you for years. [Laughs]

Sarah: Well, thank you!

Lois: So, so there’s that. I have let myself in for judging a short story contest next month –

Sarah: Duh-duh-duh!

Lois: – for Dragon Con. It’s in honor of Mike Resnick, whom I remember very well from, back in Ohio he was very kind to me when I was a newbie pro coming up on the convention circuit there, so. So that, that got me for that. It’s not something I normally do. So, and I’m planning to have the summer off. I, I don’t want to spend a summer, you know, a nice Minnesota summer sitting indoors at my desk. I did that all winter. I’m going to go outside.

Sarah: Well, that’s what summer –

Lois: Something in the fall maybe.

Sarah: That’s what summer in Minnesota is for!

Lois: [Laughs] Yeah.

Sarah: That and a salad made with Jell-O and some kind of whipped cream.

Lois: Yeah, well, you know, it’s – there are people who are into winter sports. I am not one of them, so why I live here is some kind of question.

[Laughter]

Lois: So yeah, maybe that moving is so hard, so I think I’m here for a while. But, but writing a book is a wonderful way to pass a Minnesota winter when you are not into winter sports.

[Laughter]

Lois: Heaven knows I have time; I am rich in time. I wish I could send some of this time back to my younger self, who needed it so desperately? You know, here, have six hours; I’m not doing anything with it. You can use it. But, but it doesn’t work that way.

Sarah: No.

Lois: So, so what I lack usually is not time to write but an idea that excites me enough? You know, it has to, the minimum bar it has to get over is it has to be more interesting to me than playing another round of Bubble Pop!, you know, so it’s, yeah –

[Laughter]

Lois: – there we go. Anything that isn’t more exciting than that, you know, just doesn’t make it over the, over the hump.

Catherine: So speaking of, you know, getting to relax after finishing this novel, what are you planning to read next, or what are you reading now that you’d like to talk about?

Lois: Oh gosh. Reading a lot of manga. If you go to my Goodreads blog – if you look up Lois McMaster Bujold Goodreads blog, it should come up – there’s a little thing in the top bar says My Books, and those are all the books that I’ve read and reviewed, just kind of for my own interest, because Goodreads makes it so easy.

Sarah: Oh yes, they do!

Lois: So, so I’ve got a lot of stuff there. I’ve been reading a lot of manga because of the eyes. Because for some reason I can read manga and it’s not a problem, whereas reading lines of print, particularly if it’s small print set close together is like, not anymore.

Sarah: Forget it.

Lois: But I can read manga without the eyestrain. So there’s a lot of, been a lot of that lately. Some of it has been a bust; some of it has been great. I usually find manga because I’ve been watching the anime, speaking of eye, giving my eyes a break, and, and then follow back because the anime stops but the story goes on, and okay, what really happened?

I like Ben Aaronovitch’s urban fantasy; I like Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief stories; so those are two. What else have I been reading lately? It’s, it’s on the blog. The blog remembers it for me, so okay!

Sarah: Yeah, that’s what my blog does for me too!

Lois: Yeah, what did I read last month? Oh, there it is! Oh yeah!

Sarah: What, what was that called? That was that book; it was pink; it had a thing on the front?

[Laughter]

Sarah: I think it did a thing with another thing? Yeah, I don’t remember.

Lois: Yeah, that would be it! [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah, I don’t remember.

So is there any manga that you’ve read and just thought, I need to go hit people with this, it’s so good?

Lois: [Laughs] That’s the, manga is something that, you know, it’s, you’re not going to get everybody with it, because people don’t, you know, don’t understand. They’re either into it or they’ve never heard of it. Some favorites: there’s one called Mushishi that is a favorite. It’s actually, I like the anime better because it has the color and the music and the sound, and it was really well done. And the anime episodes exactly replicate the manga chapters, which is rare. It’s a wonderful story. I want Penric to be Ginko when he grows up.

[Laughter]

Lois: So, so that was, but it’s, it’s a sui generis; it’s, you know, there isn’t anything else like it out there.

Sarah: Yeah.

Lois: Most of what I like is older stuff. See, I really liked Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle back in the day. Pandora Hearts turned out to be a hit. Just started one called, oh, a friend of mine who reads this along with me is very excited about, called Witch Hat Atelier.

Sarah: I loved that!

Lois: Oh, you’ve read it! Oh good! Okay.

Sarah: I loved it so much!

Lois: Speaking of Penric-type characters –

Sarah: Yes!

Lois: – Qifrey is very, very much in that mode, yeah. I have a type. Bleach in parts – it’s enormously long and vast quantities of it have no interest for me, but there is this one character that, you know, that I followed him, and – [laughs] – I’m reading way too much. I’ve even been watching his – I can’t really recommend it, but it had a thing going.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Lois: You know. What else is good in that whole line? And there’s, there’s a ton of it.

Sarah: What did you think of the new Aaronovitch novella, What Abigail Did That Summer?

Lois: Oh, I just read it, and I reviewed it on my blog, so it’s, it’s up there. It was fun; I enjoyed it.

Sarah: I am so annoyed that the audiobook for that is not available in the US yet?

Lois: Oh yeah. I’ve not yet listened to the audiobooks. I really need to start learning to listen to audiobooks, because the eye issues are not going to get better. But –

Sarah: They’re so good. 

Lois: – but I have a very visual mind. I think visually; I write visually; you know, I don’t remember things that I hear nearly as well as things that I see. Not yet an audiobooks consumer. But I’ve heard very good things about that narrator.

Sarah: Well, the, the, Abigail is narrated by an actress, but –

Lois: Hmm!

Sarah: – the actor who reads the majority of the Peter Grant perspective books –

Lois: Uh-huh.

Sarah: – is phenomenal. And I find that I have really good luck listening to a book that I’ve already read. It’s almost as if I hear a different part of the story than I read it –

Lois: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – ‘cause like you, I’m a visual, I’m a visual reader. I, like, imagine everything happening in my head. I also find that I – and this is so horrible; maybe this is because I’ve lived in the Northeast of the United States for too long, but everyone on an audiobook talks too slow?

Lois: Ah-ha!

Sarah: So I crank up the speed to about 1.25 to 1.35 –

Lois: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – just fast enough that my brain needs to pay attention?

Lois: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: And it’s almost as if a different part of the story is, is illustrated in my brain by hearing it.

Lois: I’ve heard that from a lot of readers, you know, that they get, you know, they get a different experience –

Sarah: Yes.

Lois: – from the same words! But –

Sarah: Yeah! Same words –

Lois: – preferred –

Sarah: – but a completely different narrator, or a completely different narrative experience. Yeah.

Lois: Mm-hmm!

Sarah: Catherine, is there anything you want to add?

Catherine: I can’t think of a –

Lois: I should add that all of my books are out as audiobooks for those audiobook readers, listeners in your, in your audience. They’re –

Sarah: Oh yes!

Lois: – they’re available.

Sarah: Yes, Grover Gardner does a wonderful job with Penric and Desdemona.

Lois: Ah-ha!

Sarah: And, and he even differentiates between the different parts of Desdemona’s history in a really lovely way.

Lois: Wow. Good!

Sarah: Yeah, he’s great.

Catherine: I’ll have to give that a try.

Sarah: Yeah, I love them.

Catherine: No idea, but that sounds cool. [Laughs]

Sarah: Catherine, do you have anything you want to add?

Catherine: I can’t think of anything; I wish I did! No, this has been wonderful, though. Thank you so much for coming onto this podcast. And thank you, Sarah, for letting me be here too.

Sarah: Oh yeah. Thank you for coming on –

Lois: – fun. I may get over my aversion to PR if it’s always as easy as this. [Laughs]

Sarah: I endeavor to make this as low-stress as possible. Thank you so much for doing this, and thank you for making us part of your PR tour for this book. We were both so honored to read it. I have, I have serious book hangover from this book. Like, I haven’t started a new book yet because I’m still just sort of reveling in the afterglow of having read it. It’s wonderful. Thank you so much.

Lois: Oh good.

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this week’s episode. Thank you to Catherine for getting up very early to be part of this conversation from Australia, and thank you to Lois McMaster Bujold for making us one of the few stops on the PR tour for The Assassins of Thasalon. I will have links to all of the books she talked about, and if you haven’t tried the Penric and Desdemona series, I love it so much. I hope that you will give it a try. I will also, of course, have links to the blog that she mentioned and all of the manga that she recommended as well.

Thank you again to our Patreon community. Recently, I asked the Patreon community for questions because I invited them to ask Amanda and me everything or anything or whatever they wanted, so the first of those two episodes will be up next week! If you would like to ask questions of me, of Amanda, of the site, whatever, and you’d like to join the Patreon community to do so, have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches.

I end every episode with a terrible joke, and this joke is extra, extra good. This joke comes from Jamie. Jamie emailed me and said that this joke was told to them at work under the breath of a coworker. “We are both infant toddler teachers, so pretty much this is the most inappropriate place possible for this joke.” So yeah, it’s a little Not Safe For Work, but it’s great. You ready? [Clears throat] Jamie, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate this.

What do you call a boat full of dildos and potatoes?

What do you call a boat filled with dildos and potatoes?

A dick/tater ship.

[Laughs] I love the idea of just these two infant toddler teachers muttering jokes to each other? That just adds so much to the silliness. Thank you, Jamie!

If you want to send me a joke, you know what to do, right? Sarah, S-A-R-A-H, at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books dot com [[email protected]].

On behalf of everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading and a wonderful weekend. We will see you back here next week.

Smart Podcast, Trashy Books is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. You can find more outstanding podcasts to subscribe to at frolic.media/podcasts.

[sweet music]