I was checking some articles on my old web site and was struck by how, well, for want of a better word, useless some older posts on the business of writing were. I mean, take the one on manuscript preparation, for example. Perfectly good advice…for 1997. Back when most venues were still paper-only and email was only good for querying, and not always then. Now it’s email attachments or online submission forms in all cases except a handful, though when I first started submitting the publishers were fighting those kind of changes tooth and nail and more teeth. That was then, and not everyone could wrap their heads around the notion that the way it was didn’t necessarily reflect the way it would be. Continue reading
Category Archives: Process
For Fritz Leiber
Saddened as I am by other more recent losses in the field, today I’m sending out props to the late Fritz Leiber. Why? Lots of reasons, but in the spirit of the Thanksgiving season, I’ll concentrate on the personal–Fritz Leiber was responsible for a revelation. For those of you (anyone? Bueller?) who are old enough to remember, the mid to late 1970’s saw a boom in the Sword & Sorcery genre. Yes, it’s still around, sort of, but back then it was different. S&S was HOT, hot like urban fantasy hot, like Steampunk hot, if you can grasp that. As both a reader and a beginning writer, I got caught up in it. REH, the De Camp retellings, Andy Offutt, Gardner Fox for pete’s sake.
And then I found Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Mouser series. I was a little too late to the party to have read them in the Cele Goldsmith Fantastic, as I said before, I came along in the Ted White era, but the Fafhrd and Mouser stories were being collected in book form by that time, and that’s where I found them.
Whoa. Continue reading
Evolve or Die Revisionism
This has touched on something I’ve talked about before, but I’m always willing to revise an opinion when new information comes to light. Especially if the new information tends to back me up but suggest an important angle that I’ve overlooked. I’ve talked about ebook pricing, but now I think I need to revisit the role of traditional publishers in this brave new world of electronic media. Before I do, you really need to read this article by Kristine Kathyrn Rusch, so hop on over there. I’ll wait. Continue reading
Great Expectations – And Heaven Help You if You Don’t Deliver
As has been pointed out more times than I can count, and not just by me, anything we write that is meant to be read constitutes an implied contract with the reader, whoever that reader might be. The reader agrees to read what we’ve written with an open mind, and in return, you agree not to waste their time. I say anything, because this applies to a legal document or a business letter just as much as it applies to a work of fiction. One distinction is, in fiction, you’re allowed to play with reader expectations, mostly because you’re allowed to do anything, even things you don’t yet have the skill to get away with. Even when you do have that skill, turning readers’ expectations on their heads and making them like it is a trick you can only pull now and then, for the obvious reason that, if you do it enough, then the readers’ expectations change and now they’ll be disappointed if you don’t try to lead them down the garden path. The contract remains the same but the assumptions informing that contract change all the time.
Review: Hyakunin Isshu – One Hundred People, One Poem Each
Hyakunin Isshu edited by Fujiwara no Teika, Translation by Larry Hammer, Cholla Bear Press, 2011. Print edition through Lulu.com
In the 13th century CE, a nobleman named Teika of the Fujiwara clan compiled an anthology of 100 poems, each by a different poet, the Hyakunin Isshu. This volume wasn’t unique, but as Larry Hammer notes in his foreward, this particular collection has become so famous over the years that any time someone refers to the Hyakunin Isshu, they mean this one. Anyone who has watched much anime may have seen a memory card game called karuta being played on New Year’s Day. That card game is based on this compilation, which shows that the anthology has survived in Japan’s popular culture down to the modern age. Continue reading
Richard Parks 