The Vorkosigan Companion by Lillian Stewart Carl, John Helfers Page A

daily life, it lies in the characters' lives and moral dilemmas. "All great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection," as one of my characters remarks. The human condition is a mess and always has been, and visions of perfecting it are a snare and a delusion, but we can all grab for great moments—for one floating instant, to do better than we think we can. Heroes are just people who are lucky or determined enough to match the moment—and at least once, to get it right when it matters.
    LSC: So now, after this long strange (and one hopes, ongoing) journey, that's what it's all about?
    LMB: If writers have a duty, it is to think as clearly as we can; to reexamine all our assumptions repeatedly on both micro and macro scales. Happily, this also will yield us better fiction. A novel is a slice out of the writer's worldview. The slice in turn, if it is coherent, generates as an emergent property a comment on living as human beings, which is the book's theme. We experience theme, even if we cannot articulate it openly, as an exhilarating sense of meaning to the book. The book has succeeded in creating meaning inside the head of another person. And in my worldview, that's what art is for.
    LSC: Thank you. For every word.
     

Publishing, Writing, and Authoring:
Three Different Things
Lois McMaster Bujold
    You may imagine that a bunch of writers discuss High Art when they get together, but I'm sorry to say they more usually bitch about the publishing business. (The less obvious reason for this is that no writer can talk about his/her own work in front of another writer with the emotional intensity they really feel; it just doesn't work, socially.)
    The business as it is presently constituted consists of three parts: publisher, distribution system, and bookstores, followed at a remove by readers. A publisher's actual main customers are therefore not the readers, but the book chains and the big distributors who in turn supply small bookstores and libraries. Present conditions have the publishers trying to push ten gallons of books into a five-gallon pipeline (the distribution system) into a three-gallon bucket (the bookstores). Something has to give, and it does.
    One way to get More Stuff through is to speed it up, which is why books whip on and off the shelves with such velocity (category romance novels are given, count 'em, thirty days on the market before being replaced by the next batch). What this means is, the speed of book turnover has grown to be faster than the speed of word of mouth, a slowish process formerly vital to a new book or author. All but the very first readers to buy a book thus have no way to send economic feedback messages back through the system saying, "More, please." The late reader's vote is not counted; the reader who borrows instead of buying casts no vote at all.
    The selling of any book traditionally falls into two periods. The first phase takes place months before the book is published, out of sight of any reader, when the publishers send their sales people out to take orders from their real customers, the aforementioned middlemen. I was bewildered when I first heard of a large ad budget being spent on a book when I never saw sign of an ad in any newspaper or even bookstore. Turns out that money was being spent advertising to distributors of various ilks. Publishers have turned, in something like despair, to attempts to buy room for their books in that narrow pipeline; hence such things as paid placement at the front of a bookstore, front page treatment in book chain newsletters, various complex incentives for high volume, etc. (I won't even get into the horrors of the book returns system.) The sales force works like mad to pitch the packaging of their books to a harried crew of buyers who, given the volume of books to pass through their hands, cannot possibly read the actual texts.
    Only after those orders are collected is the size of the print run chosen. So to a great degree, the level of