The Elusive Beauty of the Thing

May 23, 2014 by admin Leave a comment

I have one of those memories of being a kid, one of those curated memories, that you still have because you’ve been taking it out and looking at it, every now and then, your whole life.

I’m five or six or seven years old, living in the Ur-House, the first house, the small four bedroom white clapboard house with the bad wiring, the brass fuses that you screw in like lightbulbs, with the tiny window on the top, so you can see when they burn through.

So I’m living in the Ur-house and I’m playing in the yard, like we used to. Mom is nowhere about, Dad is at his job at the University, and I’m making a thing. I’m using white string and sticks and tiny rocks, and I’m playing on the wall that supports our neighbors driveway, that keeps his yard from spilling into ours.

We lived on a giant hill, a drumlin, like a hobbit hill, cobbled in red brick, to give it traction, and each yard is like a terrace. Which, I suddenly realize, for the first time in fifty years, is why the street is named Scotholm Terrace.

The thing I’m building into a gap in the rubble stone wall is a web. A three dimensional web of string, tied to the stones in the wall, tied to pebbles that I reposition to make the thing look cooler. I’m making it for a long time. Back when time was long. Back when an hour could be an endless abyss, a half-hour an aching hole, if spent at the doctors office, or, a heartbeat, when spent with a friend.

I finish it. Or is it finished? I can’t tell. I can’t remember making anyone else look at it. I don’t know if I needed to have anyone else look at it, then. I’m called away. I forget about the web, the thing.

The next day, there’s a sodden mass of pebbles and dirty string in it’s place. The web has collapsed. I try to remember what was so cool about it. I think about rebuilding. It’s not worth it. I do something else.

My writing is like that web. Caught up in it, the logic of it, I’m at peace. In the clear light of the following day, I’m confused. Why is this worth doing, again? Why am I playing with trash?

There are so many things to do, you see.

I have an SST, a drag race car, which I rev up to impossible speeds by pulling a t-shaped strip of plastic through a flywheel gear. I have a model of Godzilla with glow in the dark claws and tiny green plastic army men, and by getting down very low, and shooting up at it with my instamatic, I can make it look huge, forcing the perspective. There are playboy magazines in the house, which I can sneak off with for moments of stark religious wonder. The sixties!

My mom smokes low tar cigarettes and wears cat glasses and my parents throw loud parties, which get louder as the night wears on, preventing me and my brother from sleeping, and so we sit on the stairs and listen to them, the grown-ups, to the rise of fall of laughter and conversation, smelling cigarettes and booze and the infinite possibilities of the country roiling around us. Viet Nam on the TV, LSD and My Lai massacre and Nixon and Sgt Pepper and the things I make.

The drawings. The secondary worlds. The cutaway underground fortresses, the starships and the giant impossible city sized vehicles.

The paperback cover worlds all around me. Spacescapes and abstracts and lush Frazetta women. Vampirella, Puff n’ stuff and Timothy Leary

Oh! The things that I have seen. The trash that has collected in my mind.

And now, to sit alone in a room and remember life.

Getting Something Out of It

March 25, 2014 by admin Leave a comment

15136_1305500037309_6543897_n — Evidence of industry; unused marketing card concept for failed entrepreneurial thingy

When I was a tech entrepreneur, I had a boss who liked to say, about working for his web-based startup company, that you got out of it what you put into it.

Yeah. I know. But I fell for it.

I loved this guy, he was brilliant, a straight-edge former body builder who abstained from drinking and drugs and, more amazingly for someone his age, social media. A punk musician and programmer, I spent a year with him, and three other guys and his tough-talking, exquisitely beautiful girlfriend from the wrong side of the tracks. We worked together on something; he worked harder than everyone else put together, of course, as it was His Thing, his Company, his Vision.

This thing that never went anywhere.

I made stuff for him, though which I still have, logos and branding and photos and copy and screens, and a business plan. I learned a lot, even if mostly what I learned is that Business is Hard, and failure is always an option. We fell out, and he’s off somewhere now, making iPhone apps, I think, was the last I heard, chasing the dream, still.

As long as you never quit, you never lose. Well. I guess eventually you die, one way or the other, and there’s some kind of reckoning.

Which brings me back to writing, and my present.

We live in a culture that measures everything with money. When people ask you what you do, it is understood, that that person is asking how you make a living. She’s not asking about church or volunteer work or your silly little hobbies. Because, quite frankly, as far as the culture is concerned, that’s all bullshit. Money talks. That bullshit walks. (That bullshit can’t even afford public transit.)

If you ever meet a man or woman of means, someone who doesn’t have to work, and ask them this question, you’ll get a job-like reply . People with money do things, frequently things that could pay enough to earn a living, and so, they say that, skipping over the ‘how I make my money’ part of the question, as if by asking what they did, you really wanted to hear what they do.

If you ask a stay at home parent, especially if he’s a man, he’ll generally tell you what he used to do, or now does part time while he spends the lion’s share of his time taking care of his kids. Nobody says, “I spend most of my time doing laundry, shopping, cooking, cleaning and teaching and farting around with and driving with my kids. I bill a few hours a week too.”

They say, instead, “I’m a freelance writer.” Or editor. Or designer. Or whatever.

In my workshops, I can sometimes feel the resentment radiating from the folks I write with who have to work full time, soul-devouring jobs to support their families. I tell them what I’m doing and they say, “Must be nice.”

And it is. It is nice. It’s also hell.

Because that culture, the one we live in, the one that made us, the one that surrounds us, is inside us too, judging us and measuring us and whispering in our ear, always, ‘how much money are you making at this? For how much time? Gee. Why don’t you collect cans on the street instead?’

Even for those enjoying the free lunch, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

I have my shield, now, my armor, given to me by Sheila Williams, the editor of Asimov’s SF magazine, and Gordon Van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Warren Lapine, editor of Fantastic Stories. My last eight professional fiction sales. But this is a relatively new thing, and I don’t know exactly what to do with it. I wave it around a lot , the three issues of Asimov’s.

I’m a science fiction writer. Really.

Writer Jay asks Employer Jay, sometimes, what the hell he thinks he’s doing. (Hint: he is not making regular 401k contributions.) Employer Jay smiles, and says…

You get out of it what you put into it.

Our lives are hopelessly confused baskets of apples and oranges with no straightforward way to convert one thing into another, no simply logical way to organize our fleeting time and precious energies. I want to tell you how much I made writing last year, and I don’t want to, because it isn’t professional; the amount I made and the act of telling it to you, both. I want to be professional. I know that writing is both more than a profession for me, and, alas, at the moment, less. I’ve told you that writing is a source of meaning, and I stand by that.

But I look forward to a time, when I can answer this question, in all senses of the word, without caveat or explanation.

I’m a writer, I’ll say. And I’ll mean it.

Now, back to work, imaging this into reality.

No one can tell you lose, if you never stop playing.

Colorful, Collectible Pain from the Past

January 26, 2014 by admin Leave a comment

A friend told me that the word nostalgia means, literally, pain from the past. For me it is a mixture of pain and pleasure, celebration and regret.

As I raise my children, I find myself mining the library, and the net for the media and culture I experienced at their age. I don’t know why I do this. Why relive my childhood while I’m living through something that is real, here and now? Am I trying to understand them or myself?

Comic books for me were the gateway drug for reading; mainly reading Science fiction and fantasy, which is what most comic books actually are, at their core. I collected comics for a period of a few years, reaching back a few years through the piles of back issues sans covers in the basement of Economy Books, in Syracuse New York.

Syracuse had no comic book store; I knew nothing of comic book conventions, and I never had the gumption to buy the mail order catalogs of back issues advertised in every issue I bought. (I did once order the 1000 roman soldiers advertised in about a billion comics of that era, and was rewarded by the small padded envelope containing ten crude plastic racks of 100 pea-sized plastic figures which arrived a few months later. An early lesson in the cruelty of capitalism: caveat emptor.)

I was a reader, not a collector, though I admit to being fooled into buying a few dozen ‘first issue specials’ (there was a series called ‘first issue special’, as I recall, which debuted a series of instantly forgotten characters…) I started out reading a few superhero titles, but was gradually snared into buying pretty much the entire marvel line-up to follow the complex storys which twisted through most of the titles. You’d be reading the Fantastic Four, and all of sudden, BAM, you missed something that it turns out happened in the Agengers. So now you have to get that Avengers. Hm. Now you have to get all the Avengers you can get your hands on, too. And so on.

As a kid you think you’re interesed in the characters, and the writers and artists feel secondary. At some point, though, you realize, that the books are created by the writers and artists, and that a good book could, in a single issue, turn into pure shit, if the creative team was broken up and moved somewhere else, which happened regularly.

So, quality in a comic book is this ephemeral frission of writer, artist, and character, which happens now and again. One long-standing team, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby, of course, created a canon of characters which has grossed untold billions of dollars for the faceless, brutal corporation which held ownership of the intellectual property they created. (Marvel is now part of the Disney Borg Collective. God help it.)

Starting around 1960 (which is around when I started) they forged a mythos out of the end stages of the post war boom, generally radiation power archetypes designed to play against type, reinventions of the superhero as defined by DC, their competitor. Instead of ultra-rich alpha males, Batmen, invulnerable aliens pure of heart and spirit, we had the relunctant superhero, Spiderman, the accidental Jeckle and Hyde, the Hulk, and the dysfunctional family of superheros, the Fantastic Four.

I read and reread the comics. Each comic was too short to contain much of an experience, but I found if I had a dozen or so comics of a given title, I could read them at a single sitting, creating in my mind a damn fine animated feature film.

It took me awhile to realize that some of the multiple titles containing the same characters (there were multiple books featuring Spiderman and the Fanstic Four for example) were reprints of earlier books; references to previous issues as footnotes finally sunk in and I realized that each title was really a single long story, in the mid seventies, somewhere between issue 100 and 200, for most of the characters I was following. It was a sobering realization. How would I ever catch up? I couldn’t afford to buy the back issues. there were no libraries of these things. The experience was fragmentary, exasperating. The objects themslves fragile. and the cost per minute of reading, compared to a novel, astonomical.

I could buy a paperback for 1.25; the price of five comics. I could read the five comics in an hour. The book would take 5-10 hours to read. Used prices for these things scaled similarly. My desire to escape the here and now of adolescence coupled with my financial means drove me away from comics. That, and an experience in middle school which makes me shiver to the present day.

It was the first day of sixth grade, first day of a new school. Our math teacher, a disturbingly pretty and well-built young woman, set aside half of the first day of class for us to ‘get to know’ each other. I was paired with a cute woman of my age, whom I was told to tell something about myself. What I liked to do. What I enjoyed. I was tremulously excited by the whole thing. An ice-breaker! With an actual girl! Hormones had begun to drive me mad at that point. I thought a lot about girls.

I said I liked comic books.

“Comic books??” She made a face as if she had smelled something very bad. I knew instantly I had made a terrible mistake.

“Yeah,” I said. “Comic books.”

So began the most miserable three years of my existence.

I’ve since made friends who were more resourceful that I was, living near bigger cities, who got farther with their collections, who attended conventions, who aquired encylopedic knowlege of the writers, artists, inkers and colorists, who made these books. My comic collecting, and reading was half-assed. (Like a lof of what I do.)

But now…now it is possible to find on-line, in peer to peer shared filess, the entire continuitys of these characters…for free. I bought the first 40 years of the Fantastic four for 40 dollars. The other titles are dribbling into my hard drive as we speak as CBR archives. The final piece of the puzzle is the ipad, whose glowing color screen and perfect touch screen interface makes reading these archives almost as good as fondling the fragile paper products themselves.

Now I can read the whole damn story. Every last bit of it.

The problem is, a lot of this stuff is pretty terrible, dull, repititive, stilted, juvenile. Still, somehow, there is a feeling of accomplishment. The kid who couldn’t afford these things, who could never get enough of them, who gave them up more out of practicality than desire, can now find…closure.

My son, 13, reads Manga. My 11 year old reads other things (though the complete mad spy vs spy entranced him worlessly for a hundred hours)

And I am finishing the collection I began at ten years old, remembering some of what I read, while some of it is new, enjoying the clothes, hairstyles, pop culture references more than the endless punch outs and shattered buildings. Nixon! Hippies! Women’s Lib!

I have no real desire to read beyond my era; I want to read the comics from my birth to about my 15th birthday… the slick, full-colored things that the comics grew into…I don’t know if I’ll be interested in that. And in some wierd way it feels like something is completed as I do it, some forgotten thing found, some missing piece falling into place.

And maybe somehow it helps me figure out what I do next.

PS: This is one of a series of notes I wrote a few years ago before I started writing fiction again; I’d forgotten about them until a new FB friend found and ‘liked’ one. I’d given up on blogging under my own name at that point, as I’d noticed that I got almost no hits on the blog, but my FB stuff was ‘liked’ and commented on by many. So, for the record, the boys are now 15 and 13 and we’re watching stuff from the 60s 70s and 80s that I remember, in and around the new stuff. The project continues, but I can see its end now, in a few years, as my teens become young adults, and I leave my second, and perhaps final, childhood behind.

New Year’s Revolution

January 14, 2014 by admin Leave a comment

che-bart-simpson1 I liked the sound that of that title. Not sure what it means exactly, but I like it. I see Dick Clark in a Che t-shirt. I guess it’s an android Dick Clark. Or maybe it’s the guy above there.

I’ve got four stories out at the moment and another four in the works; I continue to revisit old stories, sometimes throwing them out and starting them over, sometimes editing and rewriting them so extensively they become new. Again, I’ve lived with a lot these things in the back of my mind for a long damn time. As the stories sell there’s a sense of liberation, release, and a sense of urgency, to come up with new things.

My goal is to produce 1500 new words a day, five days a week. I’ll also edit and revise and submit and research, but the 1500 is not negotiable; if I miss my totals I make it up on the weekend. If I go over I can save the words up, too, or buy a day off.

So far so good.

I’m exploring writing in other genre’s under various pen names. Science Fiction, fantasy, genre, whatever you want to call it feels like home to me, but I’ve read extensively in other genres too, so, why not give them a try? Maybe I learn something. Maybe I bring that back to the SF.

The 1500 a day feels like a good number; that’s 2-3 hours on a good day, 4-5 on a bad day. It’s a bit less than the 1600 or so a day of nano-wrimo, the short-novel-in-a-month thing, but I’m taking weekends off; it’s 50% more than Carolyne See’s 1000 word a day goal as detailed in her Making a Literary Life. (Oh, and I’ve given up on her charming notes, short notes written to connect with working writers whose work you admire, for the time being. I’ve made a few contacts but five notes a week seems excessive.)

Writing faster I find that the editing process is longer and more involved. No big surprise. But it all feels doable at the moment.

Non-writers are confused by word counts; they think in pages, though the e-reader is screwing that up, with variable font size. So how long is 1000 words? One way to measure the length of a text is by having your computer read it to you out loud; (it’s also a good way to copy-edit a text.) A recently completed 11,000 word novelette of mine clocks in at seventy four minutes when read out loud by Mac OS. So a 1000 words works out as 6.8 minutes.

At this rate it takes ten weeks to complete a first draft of a short novel. (9.7 to write The Catcher in the Rye, at 73,000 words; It would take 28 weeks to complete Moby Dick at 203k words (writing it, not reading it.) So the industrious soul should be able to crank out two Moby Dick’s per year by working, say, six days a week.

On the one hand it seems like not very much work at all; telling a seven minute hunk of a story per day; on the other hand, writing two Moby Dick’s per year seems absolute ludicrous. Chances are most of the writers you read do not produce final product at anything like this rate.

But some people do.

I’m going to try to be one for awhile.

Wish me luck.

(This was 560 words, and it in no way counts towards my daily goal. So off I go!)

My Favorite Year

December 22, 2013 by admin Leave a comment

holiday-2013 — Lucas O’Connell, Milo O’Connell, Mary Jane O’Connell, Jay O’Connell Letting it Be in 2013

2013 is the year when it changed for me as a writer. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. I joined three peer group workshops in 2012, B-spec, Griffins and Mechanics (led by Michael McComas who teaches SF at the CCAE), and poured myself in. My original 2012 goal, of collecting another 100 rejection slips before quitting again, was interrupted by a sale to Warren Lapine’s Fantastic Stories of the Imagination anthology. So my first story after the 20 year hiatus sold quickly to a great friend and supporter in an antho with lots of cool writers.

Good start. Keep going then. Then I sold my first five submissions to Sheila Williams at Asimovs. I’d gotten a few one-line typed notes from Gardner Dozois, after Clarion, but had slipped back to a generic reject, in the 90s. Was I better this time around? Perhaps so.

On a whim I completed a fragment started in the 90s, about my relationships with genre men who have problem with relationships. If you are a genre person, you know what I’m talking about. The end I found felt perfect, an undeserved blessing, as I’d had no idea it was coming. Google Glass / wearable computing makes another appearance; actually a better version of Glass; one that passes for normal eyewear.

This story sold to F&SF a few weeks back.

I’ve wanted to appear in these two magazines for twenty years. I gave up on a career as a novelist in large part because I didn’t get into them in the nineties. (Hint: do not give up on your career as a novelist because you are not published in three magazines. There are more professional quality stories than there are places to publish them. Yes, I was told this in the 90s, too. But you should listen to me, because I am now publicly kicking myself.) Now I’m in.

So. Happy? Yes. Terrified? Certainly; nowhere to run, nowhere two hide, time to put up or shut up. Sure, I could lay a few more cliches there, (fish, bait, shit, pot, etc.) but you get the point.

Time to write at longer lengths; time to finish novel drafts and shop for agents; time to look into teaching opportunities, because I love that, I love teaching, and it seems like maybe I do know a thing or two worth sharing.

Because I love writers and writing as much, no, more than I fear rejection. More than I fear being revealed as a fraud.

So; fearless into 2014 we go, all together now. Do your best. Let your best be good enough. As they say in Kindergarten, and so few of us ever get the hang of.

Campbell, Heironymous, and Dean

November 26, 2013 by admin Leave a comment

My novella, Of All Possible Worlds, has now gone back to Sheila Williams at Asimovs for a final decision. Will it or won’t it be the longest story I’ve ever I’ver sold–or told. I won’t know for some period of time, weeks or months, but it feels good to be done with it for now.

The story includes some history of science fiction elements, as well as, well, historical elements, taking place in the 90s in an alternate universe where JFK, Robert Kennedy, and MLK were never assassinated. The Dean Drive, a supposed reactionless space drive technology which was promoted in the pages of John W. Campbell’s Astounding / Analog magazine is one component; Wilhelm Riech’s Orgone Box makes an appearance, as does Galen Heironymous’s epynomous machine .

Getting the re-write finished as the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination played out was an interesting experience. My parents and I both had our children as one world was ending and another, darker world dawned. A month after I was conceived, the Cuban Missile crisis turned the cold war from an abstraction into the omnipresent specter of doom which would walk beside me from early childhood to late adolesence. Yet, we came as close to annihilation as the species ever has, as I gestated in my mother’s womb, no bigger than a frog.

The apocalypse? You’re soaking in it!

My mom’s obstetrician, concerned about her stress, recommended drinking an extra glass of wine a day, to ease her nerves, but alcohol made her nauseous. So she smoked her low tar cigarettes and attempted to relax and go with the flow. The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

And so, a few years after the unpleasantness in Cuba, when those shots rang out, and Kennedy fell, my parents were hard at work, my mother confined in that female prison of sixties motherhood, marking time until she could go back to grad school and do something real with her life, my father making his career in Academia. I was grumpy but not a case of full blown colic, perhaps having inhaled too much apocalypse, cold war fumes or side stream cigarette smoke. My parents had another child, my brother John–and then, BOOM, they killed Bobby and Martin and there were race riots and war protests and that post WWII glow was really and truly gone for good.

Fast forward 30 years or so.

The cold war ended without WWIII, for no real reason anyone has ever been able to articulate. Bill Clinton presided over an era when the worst thing, the absolute worst thing, that was happening, the thing that his political opponents assured us was impeachment worthy, was lying about a eight minute blow job with an intern in a civil trial. Remember? Remember, when they asked us, WHAT WOULD WE TELL THE CHILDREN? As they, you know, told the children. Over and over and over again. A booming economy was a tide lifting all ships. Sure, it lifted the yachts with nine dollars out of ten, but even the leaky canoes were buoyed up by that trickling down final dollar.

For god’s sake, they were paying me 100 dollars an hour for playing with photoshop while intoning the words ‘brand experience’.

Then… I watched a partisan supreme court decision install the worst president in history, watched the towers fall, watched the US launch its first pre-emptive unilateral war based on cooked intelligence, with my kids toddling about my ankles. We turned off the TV news at that point, actually, I read about 911. I didn’t watch it more than once. And as a result, I never fully empathized with my PTSD addled countrymen. I read of two towers falling; the rest of the country watched hundreds upon hundreds of towers fall, over and over and over again, and they went mad, embracing anyone and anything they felt might keep them safe. In this case, preemptive war, torture, and tax cuts.

My parents and I both muddled through the madness.

Children are not had for rational reasons. They are always a kind of ridiculous hope, a hail mary pass, that somehow the world is going to be OK, and that life is worth living. That the good outweighs the bad, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Every child is a selfish act. Every child is a hopeful thing.

Like a submarine orbiting mars, powered by a violation of Newtonian physics. Like a blueprint that works as well as the machine built from it. Like a box made of wood and steel wool which can heal everything that ails you.

All these things, each as supremely unlikely as you are. What fantastic set of unlikely catastrophes had to happen to give you birth, eh?

To me, the most unlikely thing of course, is that I’m actually publishing my damn fiction in Asimov’s, after giving up for twenty years.

Here’s to the unlikely, the plot twist, the eye-popping coincidence, that saves us from the next headlong plunge into the abyss.

Here’s to dumb luck. We’re all going to need it, I suspect. I know I will.

On Transcending The Genre

October 28, 2013 by admin Leave a comment

228629_1028573994331_6426_n — Pecking out my first few stories while a sophomore in college.

“I don’t really get the genre thing,” My friend Steven Solomon said to me, about my writing, once. Stephen is an artist, who has a day job usually, but he’s a real artist, not a commercial artist or graphic designer or an illustrator, things I have been and at one time wanted to be.[/caption]

Of course, he does those things, too—but he’s an artist; by which I mean, he takes what he does seriously. It’s an attitude thing.

He isn’t stuck up or too good for pop culture; his encyclopedic knowledge of comic books, of Jack Kirby and Superman, is breathtaking. But he doesn’t see himself as confined to, limited by, any kind of commercial limitation for his work; he’s not a category; he’s not a shelf in a bookstore; he’s bigger than a genre.

Steven Solomon was on my mind at Clarion, when talking to Michael Swanwick, about his book Vacuum Flowers, and Gibson’s book Neuromancer. I’d loved both books, and held them in more or less equal esteem, and said so to Swanwick, imagining this might be endearing.

Swanwick winced, as if I’d offered him a shot glass full of urine.

“I had written a book, ‘in the tradition.’ Bill wrote one outside of it.” he said, finally.

Have I mentioned that I feel like I have been a disappointment to my Clarion instructors?

Swanwick also mentioned that by appropriating the term Turing Police for my own, well, Turing Police, in my first published story, I’d looted Gibson in a thoroughly uncool way. I had a stupid defense, about genre people sort of building on each other’s work, which was just plain wrong; Swanwick was right. It was OK to have Turning police, people doing what they do; calling them that was unforgivable.

I was wrong. Sorry, Mr. Gibson. I suck.

Which leads us back to genre, ‘in the tradition,’ being derivative, and making art out of crap, which is what Michael Swanwick said genre artists, at their best, do.

I always wanted to be visual artist or a writer, what a business partner of mine who abandoned me during the tech bubble called an original content creator; but I couldn’t really imagine myself a fine artist. Or maybe I could, when I was very young, before middle school, and I grew out of it.

I recall vividly, telling my seventh grade English teacher, Ms. Moore, that I would like to be an artist when I grew up, and she said to me, without missing a beat, that she was sure I’d be a fine graphic artist, and I didn’t really know what she meant, what the difference was, between real art and graphic art, but I knew instinctively that I had been demoted, and I recall feeling insulted.

I also recall feeling brought down to Earth. I mean, how many people really got to be artists?

We didn’t have a lot of art books in the house, or live near any major museums growing up in upstate New York, so Art, Fine Art, was something of a mystery. I knew about the handful of artists that impinged on the mainstream culture of the day. Andy Warhol. Picasso. Salvadore Dali. Peter Max and Leroy Niman. But that was about it.

We had a book of MC Escher prints, though, which fascinated me. I looked at those, over and over again. And once, even read some of the text and found that Escher was a Graphic artist. Which made me feel like, OK, maybe it would be OK to be one of those after all.

Growing up in the 70s in suburbia, art was a rack of posters in a local bookstore; art was album covers and book covers and calendars. Roger Dean and Frank Frazetta and the Brother’s Hildebrandt and the others I started to collect. I bought books full of pulp covers. Fell in love with the scratchboard and pen and ink of Virgil Finley. Art was illustration.

And so I planned on becoming an illustrator.

No teacher ever really liked my writing, I was a B minus writer, but my drawing was better than about 95 percent of those around me. Becoming an illustrator, a graphic artist, seemed like a mature, grown up way to be Creative without starving to death.

So my writing was confined, from my teens through my late twenties, to thinking up premises for SF worlds and characters, and talking about these ideas with my friends.

The mechanics of typing manuscripts was quite simply exhausting to me, in the late seventies. I’m not a natural writer, a good speller, and typing my papers for high-school or college was nightmarish. I was once so absurdly grateful to a woman, a fellow student, for typing my paper I slept with her, even though I shouldn’t have, and honestly, didn’t really want to.

But I digress.

I attended Syracuse University enrolled in VPA, the College of Visual and Performing Arts, and did the freshman art core, which had art history and aesthetics and one of the two great teachers of my life, Larry Bakke, and actually learned what the hell art was, what the hell illustration and commercial art was, what culture was.

Like the goldfish learning about water; your own culture is more or less invisible to you unless you are forced to confront it in some weird way; travel to another culture; instruction by a great teacher.

I got just barely enough education, over the next decade or so, to be able to see what genre was; what science fiction was, as we entered the internet era, the tech bubble, the age of Wired magazine and Boing Boing and the fantasy of the Long Boom.

It all came together for me, somehow, in the white hot end of the tech bubble, and I imagined myself becoming what we called back then, unironically, a Visionary or Thought Leader. My SF career floundered when I didn’t sell my Clarion stories to major markets, and the semipro markets that were buying me winked out of existence. But it didn’t matter, because I was going to get rich on stock options, and then, write novels or make movies or so something even cooler. Possibly involving virtual reality goggles.

I had transcended the genre, see? I was living science fiction. I didn’t need to write it. That ended in a plume of ash on 911, as the tech bubble burst and I gave up on that vision of myself, not all at once, but slowly, over a decade of failed entrepreneurial ventures.

Leaving me… here. A man always in and of his times; a wasted youth in the seventies; a slacker in the late 80s, and a dot.com snake oiler through the millennium. Through it all, the SF paperbacks trailed along, stacked around the edges of my life, mixed with literary stuff and commentary and piles of piles of the New York Times.

Leaving me here, doing the genre thing; again.

But not naively, anymore, I don’t think; I’m not confined by the genre because I grew up in it; it’s part of me, hardwired, natural. I’ve been outside it, too; I’ve had a life, which I bring back to it, some little bit of the world, the part that fits into my weirdly shaped head.

And now I think, maybe I’ll never write Literature.

Maybe I’ll just tell stories.

God I hope I tell some cool ones.

Write Today. Time is Not on Your Side.

September 20, 2013 by admin Leave a comment

I got this image from Meg Rosoff’s blog, after finishing her delightful and horrific book The Way I LIve now.

It made me laugh very very hard. This gif, not the book. The book made me read it in one day, cry at the end, and go and read about the author. I’m glad she’s not dead. She wrote this book when she was 50, after a life tragedy, and, well, this made me strangely hopeful. Not the tragedy of course. But the writing of a wonderful YA book by a person a half century old who had just suffered a terrible loss.

Because, you know. I’m a half century old.

But now that funny gif is kind of disturbing me. I’m going to put in some spacers to get it to scroll off the page. Follow me down, will you? (I think this post gets positive towards the end.)

So, here is the thing

I have never spent my time wisely.

Here is the thing.

I don’t like to think about death, or dying, or things really changing.

And so I don’t spend time as much as I pass it; let it flow. I savor it, pretend it is infinite. I waste it. I revel in it.

I blink in astonishment at my two six foot tall babies. Time. Flowing.

But I don’t plan Time out, or ration it or make any kind of grown up decisions about Doing This vs Doing That.

If I’m honest, though, about my life, about how old I am, 50, and about what I want to try to do, accomplish, say, I have to realize that, I’m out of time to waste. Time is not on my side.

I’m lucky to think I have time, still, to do something, to make some kind of mark. Throughout most of human history, I’d be wrapping it up about now.

One year when I had a job job, typesetting the saddest little four page newsletters you ever laid your eyes on for a business version of a vanity press, I put this big dry-erase ‘year at a glance’ calendar up on a long white wall, and Xed off the days, noting each deadline drop, each piece of ridiculous waste paper designed and delivered.

Staring at the wall, I saw another calendar appear beside it, with the date incrementing, and another, I looked down the long white hall, and I measured the space in my mind and I saw my death out somewhere past the door to the elevator; perhaps in the bar which was strangely just across a small vestibule.

Thank God I was fired.

James Thurber once wrote a book of essays entitled Let Your Mind Alone, in response to the waves of self help books published in the 30s. Yes, we American’s have been trying to Help Ourselves for a long, long time.

In the book, the author is skeptical, of the possibilities of personal transformation, and pleads to be let alone, to be the weird cranky difficult dysfunctional person he is. This has always been my feeling. I identify with my faults as well as my strengths; it’s all me, and really, deep down I love myself in a deeply unfounded, unjustified kind of way I don’t begin to deserve.

If I could hack out all the gooey rotten stuff in me, all the rotten bits, all the dark stuff clogging up my mental plumbing, would the resultant creature even be recognizably me any more?

This is the kind of thing I think about.

In psychiatry this is called maladaptive adjustment. People identifying with their crappy mental states, their crappy diseases.

It’s time for me to recognize the fact that my creative output is too low. My process is filled with daydreaming and giving up when things feel bad, and creeping back and starting up again when the bad feelings lose track of where I am. I say I want to write, and then, the world throws freelance work at me and I say, thank God, I really want to be a grown up and make money. I have children for God’s sake.

I want to write a book as good as How I Live Now. That’s what I want to do. I know I probably can’t. (See Black Gooey Bits above.) Knowing that makes it harder of course, much much harder, but I can’t help knowing it. I just do.

So, if I want to accept, that that is how I am, I have to also become a person who does the work anyway, even though at some level I know it’s hopeless. And in that moment, of acknowledging that it’s hopeless, that I’m not very good, that I’m barely coherent, I relax, and just do it for the sheer fuck all of it.

Maybe it’s a blessing.

Maybe it’s good that I know that I suck–maybe that is the only good thing about me.

Maybe this lets me be pure. Be the Zen archer. Makes me not care where the arrow flies. Lets me stop grasping after the writer I’ll never be. The one who writes good metaphors and similes. The one who captures perfect telling details of setting, of character; the one whose dialog sings. The one who has such a wonderful backstory upon which to draw of struggle and challenge and diversity. Insight! Wit! Wisdom!

I want to write books that make teenagers think life will be worth living, that life will be filled with wonderful and awful adventures; that make people know that their hearts will both undoubtably be broken and just as certainly heal.

So. Given that, I better get writing. I’m 50. The clock is ticking Time isn’t my friend, but I have the blessing of knowing I am probably doomed, so, I’ll do it for fun, for perversity, for my writing friends… and for Sheilla Williams at Asimovs and Warren Lapine and Ed McFadden and Bruce Bethke and Charlie Ryan and Patrick Swensen and a few others who have published me who I am forgetting, who have somehow failed to get the memo about my worthlessness.

A fact for which I am grateful, when I can muster that emotion.

It’s time for get back in the saddle and embarrass the living crap out of myself.

Onward.