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.
The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and Other Stories by Jeffrey Ford. Golden Gryphon Press, 2002
“Creation” is about what it says it’s about: A young boy undergoing religious training gives in to an impulse to create as God did, and succeeds…after a fashion. The rest of the story concerns the aftermath and the young boy coming to terms with the implications and responsibilities of his action. It’s one of Ford’s better known stories, and I’ve even heard claims that it “transcends genre fantasy.” Sorry, no. This is what fantasy does. It’s the fun-house mirror that we hold up so we can see ourselves more clearly, and “Creation” does it very well. As for the “genre” part, well, genre is a marketing category, and to say something “transcends” a marketing category is pretty much a meaningless phrase. “Creation” is a damn fine fantasy story, and that’s more than enough. Continue reading
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
Had an interesting dream not too long ago. I mean, not like last night, where I dreamed I was delivering a load of tank barrels to a WWII armored division who’d gone off without theirs. And by “interesting” I mean it was to me, so I’m going to talk about it here.
I had one of those cliché dreams where you’re going back to school. Though apparently I was going to a private college with communal dorms, and your dorm group bought food as a group and took turns cooking. A little odd and outside my experience, but ok.Then in the middle of the school term I went to Hell. Literally. Not sure why. Don’t remember the death experience in the dream, but I was in Hell, not having a good time. The Devil was being about what you’d expect him to be, punishing people, and once fighting off a challenge from a rival god (not that God. A god).
Then I was back in school, but I wasn’t out of Hell. More like a furlough. See, being in Hell was no excuse for missing your turn cooking, so there I was, fresh out of Hell and trying to make pancakes. Problem was, being in Hell had screwed up my sense of temperature, so I kept burning them. Then back to Hell. Where I found out it was someone ELSE’s turn to be the Devil.
Apparently, we were all taking turns there, too.
