As I continue reading through Dr. J. Berg Esenwein’s 1908 book Writing the Short-Story: A Practical Handbook on the Rise, Structure, Writing and Sale of the Modern Short-Story (here are my first comments), I find myself drawn far more to the business side of the writing life a century ago than to any artistic advice offered.

I guess that’s because I feel that the business model of writing will always change, while the art itself is eternal. (Though I may learn differently once I dive into his century-old writing exercises.) I’m finding the differences between then and now fascinating, such as the doctor’s answer to the question: (more…)

I wasn’t the only writer to come out of the first graduating class of Brooklyn’s South Shore High School. Donna Grant, with whom I worked on the school newspaper (back when I looked like the scruffy guy in the icon at left), went that route, too, only she took a far more interesting path than I did. What’s more, that road took her to bestsellerdom.

First, she became a plus-size model, where she met Virginia DeBerry, another model who was vying with her for the same assignments. Instead of becoming rivals, the two became friends, and they teamed up to found Maxima, a fashion and lifestyle magazine for plus-size women. Eventually, they decided to try writing a book together.

Their collaboration turned into the 1997 novel Tryin’ to Sleep in the Bed You Made from St. Martin’s Press, which became a bestseller. Now it’s a decade later, and with Donna and Virginia just back from the book tour for their latest novel, Gotta Keep on Tryin’, their publisher, Touchstone, has put together a promotional video on YouTube.

With their fanbase and sales, Donna and Virginia certainly don’t need my help, so let’s just consider this a little high-school reunion.

Comic-book artist Dave Cockrum, who is most well known for his reinvigoration of two supergroups—DC Comics’ Legion of Super-Heroes and Marvel Comics’ X-Men—passed away far too soon on November 26, 2006.

Dave co-created such characters as as Nightcrawler, Colossus, and Storm, and redesigned the costumes for countless other heroes.

I have fond memories of sitting with him in the Marvel Bullpen and watching as he designed the costume for the Captain Marvel villain Deathgrip back when I was writing that book and dinosaurs still walked the Earth. Even though Dave wasn’t the artist on that title, he helped out because he was one of the greatest costume generators ever.

In addition to his prodigious talent, Dave was also one of the good guys, two qualities which aren’t always found together in the same human being. He was a gentle man who was liked by all.

Clifford Meth recently began helping Paty Cockrum liquidate the estate by selling off Dave’s personal comic-book collection. Each comic will be delivered bagged, boarded, and sealed with a “Dave Cockrum Estate” seal of authenticity.

There are even some rarities, such as a few remaining copies of The Uncanny Dave Cockrum Tribute, each containing original sketches by Dave, plus a classic copy of X-Men signed by both artist Jim Steranko and writer Arnold Drake.

If you’ve appreciated Dave’s work over the years and ever wanted to own something to remember him by, then head over to Clifford Meth’s site and check out this list for a small sample of available collectibles. And keeping checking back for updates as further items are added.

As I mentioned here earlier, two of my stories are on the preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Awards, given out each year by the Horror Writers Association. Voting is still going on to determine the nominated stories which will make up the final ballot.

This is just a gratuitous, self-serving reminder to all Active Members that their votes must be received by 11:59 p.m. today, which means that fewer than 16 hours remain.

My two stories appearing among the final twelve recommended in the category of Superior Achievement in Long Fiction are:

“Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man” (originally published in Postscripts)
“Survival of the Fittest” (originally published in Summer Chills)

If there are any voting members out there who haven’t yet made up their minds and would like to receive electronic copies of my stories for review during these final hours, please let me know.

One hundred years ago, Hinds, Noble & Eldredge published Writing the Short-Story: A Practical Handbook on the Rise, Structure, Writing and Sale of the Modern Short-Story, by Dr. J. Berg Esenwein, editor of Lippincott’s Monthly magazine.

I’ve already shared Esenwein’s magazine ad soliciting students for his correspondence school. Now let’s travel back to 1908 to absorb some of the good doctor’s practical advice on how to crack the short-story markets of his day! (more…)

As many of you have probably already read elsewhere, national treasure Marie Severin has been recovering from her recent stroke, and now that her health has improved, she’s just moved into an assisted living facility. All of us who love her look forward to her continuing with that recovery.

In addition to Marie quite possibly being the nicest person to have ever worked in the comics industry, she is also one of the funniest and most talented people I know.

Now, this might seem a rather strange and silly comparison, but back when I started working at the insane zoo that was the Marvel Comics of the ’70s, the wild and woolly Bullpen actually seemed like the Alan Brady Show to me (that fictional show within the Dick Van Dyke Show, remember?), and Marie was our Sally Rogers, the sassy wisecracking dame (a term I don’t think she would find objectionable) who always spoke her mind. She was one of the reasons it was so much fun to go to work each day at 575 Madison Avenue.

Marie is famous not only for her hilarious personality, addictive art style, and nuanced coloring, but also for her caricatures, going all the way back to her EC days. During my years on staff at Marvel, I was lucky enough to have had her draw my mug a number of times. (more…)

Writers! Are your short stories sick? Are you looking for a cure to all of your writing afflictions? Seek no further, for two doctors have the prescription for your many fiction ills.

Plucked from the pages of the April 1929 issue of Scribner’s magazine are advertisements from two doctors who are willing to show you the way to healthy prose.

First up is Dr. Esenwein, who hopes that you’ll enroll in his correspondence course in the writing and marketing of short stories. I’d never heard of Esenwein, and had no idea of the validity of his claim to be able to train his students to the point where they’d amass the talents to earn $5,000 (in 1929 dollars) in their spare time, so I figured I’d better check his credentials. A quick online search reveals Dr. Esenwein to be J. Berg Esenwein, the editor of Lippincott’s magazine and the author of the 1908 textbook Writing the Short-Story: A Practical Handbook on the Rise, Structure, Writing and Sale of the Modern Short-Story. I see that Dr. Esenwein operated out of Burlington, Massachusetts, so we now know the real reason why ReaderCon has chosen that city as its home! (more…)

Singing in the Rain has always been one of my favorite movies, and not just because of the talented stars and amazing songs (though, of course, that’s the major reason). But I think some small part of the film’s intrigue is because it’s one of the few films detailing the painful transition as one art form supplants another. I don’t see that sort of picture happening again any time soon. I mean, how likely is it that someone’s going to write a movie musical someday about the current battle between paper books and e-books?

Singing in the Rain told the story of the Talkies taking over the screen from a distance of 1952. But what did people think at the time it was actually happening? An article in the April 1929 issue of Scribner’s gives some clues. To lay out the time frame, The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, premiered on October 6, 1927, at least in the big cities, though it took around six months to be seen by the rest of the country. Based on that, and on the lead time the magazine would have required, the essay “The Screen Speaks” by William de Mille would have been written during that first uncertain year.

William de Mille was the older brother of Cecil B. DeMille and father to Agnes de Mille. He was a silent film writer, director, and producer who, according to the editorial note at the beginning of the article, “says that he will probably never direct another silent film.” So his insight into the shift is invaluable. (more…)

Somewhere on LiveJournal—or maybe it was over on the Asimov’s board—there was a recent thread about style versus substance, which contained the usual long debate about which of the two was more important. I can no longer find where that conversation was going on, so I’ll just post here what I’ve always though of as the final word on the subject, from Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic 1973 essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”:

Many readers, many critics, and most editors speak of style as if it were an ingredient of a book, like sugar in a cake, or something added onto the book, like the frosting on the cake. The style, of course, is the book. If you remove the cake, all you have left is the recipe. If you remove the style, all you have left is the synopsis of the plot.

In an essay at the back of the new edition of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon shares some of the motivations his then twenty-two-year-old self had in approaching the book. He writes of how even literature with no fantastic elements should offer the same sense of wonder delivered by science fiction:

I wanted to tell stories, the kind with set pieces, and long descriptive passages, and “round” characters, and beginnings and middles and ends. And I wanted to instill—or rather I didn’t want to lose—that quality, inherent in the best science fiction, which was sometimes called “the sense of wonder.” If my subject matter couldn’t do it—if I wasn’t writing about people who sailed through neutron stars or harnessed suns together—then it was going to fall to my sentences themselves to open up the heads of my readers and decant into them enough crackling plasma to light up their eye sockets for a week. But I didn’t want to write science fiction, or a version of science fiction, some kind of pieced-and-tattooed, doctorate-holding, ironical stepchild of science fiction. I wanted to write something with reach. Welty and Faulkner started and ended in small towns in Mississippi but somehow managed to plant flags at the end of time and in the minds of readers around the world. A good science fiction novel appeared to have an infinite reach—it could take you to the place where the universe bent back on itself—but somehow, in the end, it ended up being the shared passion of just you and that guy at the Record Graveyard on Forbes Avenue who was really into Hawkwind. I wasn’t considering any actual, numerical readership here—I wasn’t so bold. Rather I was thinking about the set of axioms that speculative fiction assumed, and how it was a set that seemed to narrow and refine and program its audience, like a protein that coded for a certain suite of traits. Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world. (Twenty-two, I was twenty-two!)

I was thinking pretty much the same thing recently while exchanging e-mails with someone about Kurt Vonnegut’s short-story collection Welcome to the Monkey House. I had forgotten how many of the stories in the book were not science fiction, and I think this was because even those stories without SF elements—such as “Who Am I This Time?,” about a man who shed his shyness when acting in community theater—always seemed to have that SF flavor to me.

And to take it a step further, not only is there much purportedly mainstream fiction which contains enough sense of wonder to have that SF feel, there’s also inversely plenty of science fiction so devoid of sense of wonder as to appear mainstream. (Though I do wish that there was a better descriptive term, as I’ve never cared for mainstream, mimetic, or mundane.)

Perhaps when I have the time someday, I’ll plot a graph, with the X-axis representing whether a work announces itself as science-fictional or not, and the Y-axis representing what each actually feels like.