Fiddler Fair (anthology)

Fiddler Fair

by Mercedes Lackey

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 1998 by Mercedes Lackey

“Fiddler Fair,” in Magic in Ithkar 3 (Tor 1989) “Balance” and “Dragon’s Teeth,” in Bardic Voices One (Hypatia Press 1988) (HC), in Spell­singers (DAW 1988) (PB); “Dance Track,” in Alternate Heroes, Mike Resnick, ed. (Bantam Spectra 1989); “Last Rights,” in Dinosaur Fantastic, Martin Greenberg, ed. (DAW 1993); “Jihad,” in Alter­nate Warriors, Mike Resnick, ed. (Tor 1993); “Dumb Feast,” in Christmas Ghosts, Mike Resnick, ed. (DAW 1993); “Small Print” in Deals with the Devil, Mike Resnick, ed. (DAW 1994); “The Cup and the Caldron,” in Grails of Light (DAW); “Once and Future,” in Excalibur!, Martin Greenberg, ed. (Warner Aspect 1995); “Enemy of My ­Enemy,” Friends of the Horseclans, Robert Adams, ed. (NAL 1989)

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

ISBN: 0-671-87866-2

Cover art by Clyde Caldwell

First printing, April 1998

Distributed by Simon and Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Typeset by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

And every other free minute

for five straight years

After any number of requests to put all our short stories together in one place, the idea began to take on some merit.

When Larry and I looked into the idea we discovered that we had a lot of other short fiction; about ten years’ worth.

Ten years? Unbelievable as it seemed at the time, I found the very first story I ever had published (I had sold one story before that, but it wasn’t published until the following month). Fantasy Book magazine, September 1985. The story was “Turnabout” which was a Tarma and Kethry story, which is going into another collection. For the record, the first story I ever sold was for Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Free Amazons of Darkover “Friends of Darkover” anthology, which was published in December of that year. The story was “A Different Kind of Courage.”

Some of these stories are a little grey around the edges, but I include them as a kind of object lesson in writing. Some of the things in them I winced at when I read again—I had no idea of how to write a well-viewpointed story, for instance, and someone should have locked my thesaurus away and not given it back to me for a while! And insofar as the march of technology goes—the earliest were written on my very first computer, which had no hard-drive, a whopping four kilobytes—(that’s kilobytes, not megabytes)—of RAM, and had two single sided single density disk drives. I wrote five whole books and many short stories on that machine, which did not have a spell-check function, either. On the other hand, if ewe sea watt effect modern spell-checkers halve on righting, perhaps it that was knot a bad thing. It’s just as well; if it had, it would have taken half a day to spell-check twenty pages. So for those of you who are wailing that you can’t possibly try to write because you only have an ancient 286 with a 40-meg hard-drive . . . forgive me if I raise a sardonic eyebrow. Feh, I say! Feh!

I held down a job as a computer programmer for American Airlines during seven of those ten years, and every minute that I wasn’t working, I was writing. I gave up hobbies, I stopped going to movies, I didn’t watch television; I wrote. Not less than five hours every day, all day on Saturday and Sunday. I wanted to be able to write for a living, and the only way to get better at writing is to do it. I managed to slow down a bit after being able to quit that job, but I still generally write every day, not less than ten pages a day. And that is the answer to the often-asked question, “How do you become a writer?” You write. You write a great deal. You give up everything else so that you can concentrate on writing.

There are many fine books out there (the title usually begins with “How to Write . . .”) to teach you the