Fantasy
Bujold also wanted to break into the fantasy genre, but met with early setbacks. Her first foray into fantasy was The Spirit Ring. She wrote the book "on spec", shopped it around, and found low offers, sending her back to Baen Books, where Jim Baen bought it for a fair price in exchange for the promise of more Vorkosigan books. Bujold called this experience, combined with the mediocre sales and lack of critical acclaim of that book, very educational.
She would not attempt to break into the fantasy market again for almost another decade, with The Curse of Chalion. This book was also written on spec and offered up to a book auction. This time, she met with considerable critical and commercial success by tapping into a crossover market of fantasy and romance genre fans. The fantasy world of Chalion was first conceived as a result of a University of Minnesota course she was taking about Medieval Spain in her spare time.
The next fantasy world she created was the tetralogy set in the universe of The Sharing Knife borrowing inspiration for its landscapes from ones she grew up with in central Ohio. She writes that her first readers who helped proof-read it said she got it exactly right and they could recognize Ohio features in the descriptions and dialects. She states that the dialect of the "farmers" is one she grew up around.
Read more about this topic: Lois McMaster Bujold
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