Free The Vorkosigan Companion by Lillian Stewart Carl, John Helfers

too.
    LSC: And then there are the several stages of editing, combined with the hair-pulling and head-desk-banging.
    LMB: Structural editing almost all takes place at the outline stage, for me, as I shove the scene sequences around and at last into place. Very seldom do I add or delete whole scenes after the first draft. When I complete a day's work I usually print it out and take the pages away to read in the new format (in a different room and chair, which my body desperately needs by that point), and mark it up with line-edit and copy-edit stuff—fixing syntax, improving word choice, adding some forgotten bit or cutting something excess that impedes the flow. At the end of the chapter, it goes out (by e-mail, now) to my inner circle of test readers; those who are syntax-and-grammar sensitive and/or rhythm-and-word-choice sensitive are pearls beyond price. They help me identify a lot of problem spots on the sentence level.
    When I agree with their critiques, I enter changes and print out the chapter that goes into the accumulating three-ring binder. I look back over this material fairly frequently as I continue to write, and mark up any problems that catch my eye. At the end of the book comes the vast appalling task of going back over the whole thing, and making all necessary changes on all levels. I enter all these, print it out again, read it again, make any other changes that seem required (by this time I'm cross-eyed and thoroughly sick of it all), and produce the first submission draft, which goes to the editor. She returns her comments, I make what responses I'm going to, and back it goes to the publisher. After that there will be the copy edit to read and approve or fix, and, finally, the galleys.
    LSC: After all these years, does it come any easier?
    LMB: Well, I'm more skilled at the mechanics of everything. I'm not intimidated or bewildered by the business anymore. There are things I haven't tried yet, so I haven't developed the chops. I've never written anything in omniscient viewpoint. I've never written anything in first person, so those are challenges yet to be met. A whole novel is this very complex pattern which would really have been too vast for my feeble logical mind to have figured out in advance, but something in my back-brain assembles it. I've learned to trust this aspect of myself as a writer.
    This doesn't mean I don't whine about my book in progress. In fact, I whine my way from beginning to end. First I whine that I can't get any good ideas, then after an initial rush I whine my way through the whole middle, which can run from Chapter 2 to Chapter 22 of a twenty-three-chapter book. And then my whining rises to a crescendo during revisions, which I hate above all other parts of the process. And when it's all over, I dither about how people will like it. The outside observer mustn't mistake normal creative whining for dislike of the work. To test this, see what happens if you try to take the book away from its author while she's whining about it. Trying to take a baby bear from its mama would be much less dangerous.
    LSC: The shelves in your home are lined by copies of your books translated into—how many languages is it now?
    LMB: Let's see if I can come up with the whole list: Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Greek, Croatian, Serbian, Czech, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Finnish, Chinese traditional-characters, Chinese simplified-characters, and I'm still missing a couple somewhere. British is a foreign sale but not—quite—a foreign language.
    Some of these are very tiny markets, mind. Our old fanzine had a bigger print run than some of them.
    LSC: Have you any explanation for your universal appeal?
    LMB: Miles does seem to survive translation well, much as he survives everything else thrown at him. A lot of other SF authors are also translated into other languages, though, so I'm just a part of the picture. I have noted with bemusement