Editing Lois McMaster Bujold (section)

==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 very educational; the book received little critical acclaim, and had only mediocre sales.

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 [[Spain in the Middle Ages|medieval Spain]] in her spare time. She would eventually expand the setting into the ''[[World of the Five Gods]]'' series, including ''Paladin of Souls'', ''The Hallowed Hunt'', and the sixteen novels, novellas, and short stories of the Penric and Desdemona series.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.goodreads.com/series/183152-penric-and-desdemona-publication-order|title=Penric and Desdemona (Publication order) Series by Lois McMaster Bujold}}</ref>

The next fantasy world she created was the [[tetralogy]] set in the universe of ''[[The Sharing Knife]]'', borrowing inspiration for its landscapes and for the dialect of the "farmers" from ones she grew up with in central Ohio.<ref name="essays">{{cite book |last1=Lennard |first1=John |title=Lois McMaster Bujold: Essays on a Modern Master of Science Fiction and Fantasy |chapter=(Absent) Gods and Sharing Knives|editor1-last=Croft|editor1-first=Janet Brennan|date=2013 |publisher=McFarland & Company, Inc. |isbn=978-0-7864-6833-1 |pages=183–184}}</ref> She writes that her first readers who helped proofread it said she got it exactly right and they could recognize Ohio features in the descriptions and [[dialect]]s.