This was a little quick. I got the notion yesterday, wrote the first half. Finished the second half today, since it was only about 1100 words in rough. Now I have to rewrite it so that what’s on the page has a passing relation to the vision in my fevered brain. You know, the usual.
I hear there are writers who get it right the first time. Like other things I’ve heard of, such as a black hole, or extra-solar planet. I’m sure they exist, but I’ve never met one.
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
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
I’m going to get a little autobiographical here. Consider yourself warned.
I used to haunt the Post Office nearly every day. That is to say, I would check the PO box dedicated to writing correspondence, submissions, etc., every single day, save only holidays. By any reasonable standard, it was obsessive and overkill. Considering the usual number of stories I had in circulation and the number of available markets, two, three times a week at most would have been plenty. Of course in my head I knew that at the time, but it didn’t stop me. Obsession and I were old friends. I’d often said that, if I didn’t have obsession, I wouldn’t have any discipline at all. It got the words out, the stories written. Now I actually do check the PO box once or twice a week, but of course these days I’ve switched my obsessive focus to email because that’s where the action is. Most submissions and acceptances and rejections, even contracts are arriving by email, and the Post Office lost its…well, I won’t say “luster.” It was the Post Office. It never had luster. Say rather its focus and attraction for me. Gone now. I do not really miss those daily trips to the Post Office.
Book stores, on the other hand…well, here’s where I start to worry a bit. Continue reading
Scene: a man and a woman repairing a plain board fence. The rails have been installed and they’re mounting the boards. The boards are rough pine, six feet long and five inches wide. The man is using a brad nailer to tack the boards on temporarily until they can be nailed properly. The woman is using a shim to set the gap in the boards and check position before the man tacks them down. There is, however, a delay in the process.
Man: What are you doing?
Woman: (Holding a fence board and turning it this way and that). “Checking, of course.”
Man: Checking? What for?
Woman: To find the prettiest side, of course. Continue reading
Richard Parks 