KEVIN KILFOIL asked Lois McMaster Bujold:

I note with regret that you say you are semi-retired. I assume that this means that your literary output will be at a slower pace than before. I am greedy for as many Bujold stories as possible. Would you ever consider working with younger co-authors to put out new books? I would expect that you would be reluctant to let Miles, Pen, Ivan, Elli, et al 'leave home', but other authors seem to be doing this.

Lois McMaster Bujold I had several offers earlier in my career for shopping out my work, and in all cases the answer was a hard no. I don't work all that well or happily with others, and the idea of some sort of publisher-arranged literary marriage to do so makes me shudder. My writing is the one thing in my life that has been entirely mine. It took me quite a long time to realize there was a lesson embedded in this.

That leaves aside the fact that riding herd on a collaboration takes just as much time, attention, and work as writing on one's own, if not more. For the same internal costs, I'd rather be writing my own stories. Or, y'know, sitting and looking at a lake.

The cores of all my stories are some sort of inner spiritual journey the characters take, that both they and I discover as I write. This generates all other aspects as I go, in real-time as it were. Not the sort of thing one could put in a setting-and-plot-centered static story-bible.

I've been self-described as semi-retired for about 9 years now, but what I've mostly retired from is PR, public speaking and conventions and their attendant travel, and other pro-paper-publishing contract and deadline stresses. If you don't count Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, which was something of a transitional book, I've written and self e-published 14 novellas and a novel since then (plus a nonfiction work of family history), so I don't think you can count my semi-retirement as my signal going dark just yet. I've just tried to eliminate all the parts except the writing, and readers. (Well, and tax-record keeping, which will extend beyond the grave.)

A work of mine, once started, demands its own completion. Ideas that grip me are slower to come, but I don't need all that many, really.

Ta, L.

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