When I was eight years old it was fun to be the center of attention. At that age, and in your own opinion, you tend to be the center of the universe—or at least someone’s universe. Not always, certainly, but it’s common enough. You want to believe you’re a genius and gifted and destined for great things, because people will tell you so. At eight years old you’re pretty much all potential anyway, and therefore limitless. It’s a great feeling while it lasts. Continue reading
Category Archives: Writing
Analyzing the Leaves and Missing the Forest
I’m acquainted with some very smart people, and as a general rule I like to hang out with very smart people. For one thing, the conversational levels are usually higher. And, while nearly everyone has something to teach, in general you’re more likely to learn useful things from people who are smarter than you are. One thing you eventually learn, as the Zen masters have known for centuries, is that intellect and analysis, wonderful tools that they are, sometimes just get in the way. You can wind up focusing your energy on understanding a description of a thing, rather than the thing itself. Naturally, the Zen masters’ “thing” was satori . Here I’m talking about story, with the following example:
There’s a writer I admire. Call her Writer A. Sexes changed or not for demonstration purposes. There are several writers I admire, and what I’m saying here could apply to almost any of them. Anyway, I like this person’s work. Not in the “I wish I’d written that” vein, since if I were writing like this person I wouldn’t be writing like me, but in the “it’s always interesting to see the world through her eyes for a while” vein.
There’s another writer I admire a little less, call him Writer B. Continue reading
More Incarnations Than Your Average Buddha
You can read the press releases and such here, but the upshot is that a fan has acquired the trademark to Amazing Stories™ that its most recent owner, Hasbro, abandoned. The plan is to revive the magazine in some form which, if it happens, will probably cement Amazing’s record, not only as the oldest, but the most re-incarnated magazine the field has ever seen.
I’m nowhere near old enough to have been around during its original incarnation, the acknowledged first magazine ever devoted to science fiction, but I personally can remember four…no, make that five revivals (six if you count the short-lived TV series), though I’m not sure the most recent version should count. Regardless, it’s safe to say that Amazing has died and been reborn…a lot. I’m not exactly sure why that is, but there’s something about the field, nostalgia or blind optimism, that simply refuses to let it go. You can see some of the same dynamic in place with the venerable Weird Tales, which has gone away and come back almost as many times. Continue reading
It All Begins at The End
There was much buzz at the World Fantasy Convention a few years ago about a book containing, shall we say, an unfortunate turn of phrase. I haven’t read the book in question so I don’t know if this was a lapse or par for the course, but surely there’s nothing worse than a passage written with serious intent turning out to be unintentionally hilarious?
Well, yeah. There is. Continue reading
Something Wonderful
Yesterday’s email brought an offer to reprint a story of mine in an anthology that will also include several of my writing heroes. I’ll give details when I’m free to do so, but right now that’s not the point. The thing is, reprint offers and especially sharing a Table of Contents with other writers I enjoy and respect are a couple of my favorite things. My very first professional sale had me sharing a ToC with Roger Zelazny, and how cool was that? Then there was this most recent touch of something fine.
Which got me thinking, or more precisely, remembering. I’ve worked with and without writer’s groups, mostly without. One thing you sometimes get from a writer’s group that you don’t get as often working strictly alone is a little dash of perspective. In an earlier version of the Writer’s Group With No Name we had a member who was working on a romance novel. We’d read parts of it and thought it promising, but the story wasn’t coming quickly or easily for her. In the meantime, most of the other members of the group were working on short fiction, and a few of us were selling. At times the meetings would turn into gripe sessions about slow markets, slower payments, incomprehensible editorial decisions, the usual. All true and the bane of writers for practically ever, but our romance writer, working hard but still with nothing in shape to show an editor, was not impressed with the bitching.
She: “I can’t imagine what that’s like.” Continue reading
