Yesterday, I shared some of Dr. J. Berg Esenwein’s advice for writers from his 1916 book, Writing for the Magazines. But what about those of you who hope to someday use a time machine to head back 92 years and work the other side of the editorial desk?

Esenwein has some words of wisdom for you as well. And he should know, because when he wrote his book, he was not only the editor of The Writer’s Monthly and sometime editor of Lippincott’s magazine, but he was also the former director of the Periodical Publishers’ Association of America.

Here are his thoughts on becoming tomorrow’s—make that yesterday’s—editorial star: (more…)

I previously shared the wisdom of Dr. J. Berg Esenwein in excerpts from his 1908 manual, Writing the Short-Story: A Practical Handbook on the Rise, Structure, Writing and Sale of the Modern Short-Story. (To revisit that advice, click on the tag below to see all eight installments.) But Esenwein clearly had more that he wanted to tell us, because he bothered to write a follow-up book in 1916, Writing for the Magazines.

“Magazine writing, it must constantly be reiterated, is both an art and a craft,” or so he wrote in his more recent book. “This volume is offered in a friendly spirit to all writers who need help in either the one or the other phase of authorship.”

I note that the previous owner of this copy looked at that advice with a jaundiced eye, because written by hand beneath the title is now the suggested subtitle, “or, How to be a Hack.” (See image at right.) Of course, perhaps being thought a hack was something devoutly to be wished 92 years ago! (more…)

I made my plane reservations for San Diego this week to attend Comic-Con International, which inevitably set me to thinking about my first comic-book convention, back when I was 15. It was the 1970 July 4th weekend Comic Art Convention, organized by Phil Seuling and held in Manhattan at the Statler Hilton Hotel. That was when I was just a fan, years before I got a staff job at Marvel Comics or freelanced for DC Comics, and decades before I edited Science Fiction Age magazine or went to work for the SCI FI Channel. I still have the convention program book, which you can see below with its cover drawing of the Sub-Mariner by his creator, Bill Everett.

Conventions were a heck of a lot smaller back then. As you can see from the two-page spread below, at the time the program book was printed, the con had only 146 attending members and 52 supporting members. Even if there were a few hundred more memberships sold at the door, that’s still a far cry from the approximately 150,000 members of last year’s con in San Diego. But though this list is small, it’s remarkable how big an affect members of this group ended up having on my life. Even though I don’t think I met any of them face to face that weekend and wouldn’t until years later in some cases, many of these people intersected with my life in important ways. (more…)

Check out this full-page advertisement for Silver Patron tequila which appears in the new (July 2008) issue of Esquire magazine.

It’s one in the company’s current series of ads which raises issues worthy of debate (i.e., a day at the beach vs. all day in bed, rich vs. happy, one more hand vs. quit while you’re ahead, etc.), only to posit that the quality of its own product is beyond debate.

Note that the ad references science fiction, mysteries, historicals, and so on. Amazing, none of the genres are being dissed.

At least, I don’t think they are.

I made a few new friends this week.

First came the toad below. He was so oblivious to me that I almost stepped on him at first. Even when I got down to his level to take this picture from a few inches away, he didn’t react to my presence except for an occasional blink. We’ve seen many toads in our backyard before, but they’re usually black, green, or grey, and never as garish as this orange one.

I believe this to be an Eastern American Toad, though maybe there’s someone out there who knows better.

Then came the turtle below, so covered in mud that I couldn’t make out enough of its markings to take a stab at its species. He eyed me suspiciously, and perhaps even glared, if turtles can be said to glare. (more…)

Yesterday, I received an advance copy of Necronomicon: The Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft, to be published by Orion, an imprint of Gollanz. The 1,008-page book will contain all of the writer’s major stories and short novels, including the entire Cthulhu mythos. I read the complete Lovecraft a long time ago, so there’s no need for me to dive into it again immediately (though someday I will, and if you haven’t yet, you should make plans to do so now), but I did enjoy reading editor Stephen Jones’ lengthy afterword, which brought to my attention some information I’d never read before.

One such tidbit was a reproduction of the cover to an issue of Home Brew, a magazine from the ’20s which had published a few of Lovecraft’s short stories. (Click on the image at right for a closer look.) I’d heard of the magazine, but I’d never seen a copy. I was very much taken by the taglines of Home Brew, which states that it is “Full of Moonshine,” and promises “Peppy Stories – Pungent Jests – Piquant Gossip.” Home Brew also claims to be “America’s Zippiest Pocket Magazine.”

Ah, they just don’t make magazines like that anymore! (more…)

Digging though our old VHS tapes in an attempt to salvage whatever there is of significance before everything completely deteriorates, I came across a segment from Eyewitness News back in either 1980 or 1981. I make that guess as to the date because, based on my weight, my beard, and the blue windbreaker I’m wearing in this piece about volunteers planting daffodils in Central Park, those seem to be the only possible years. Others who have better knowledge of when the particular talking heads you’re about to see were anchoring the local news in New York might be able to pin it down more specifically, but that’s as close as I can get. So the me you’re about to see is either 25 or 26.

Please forgive the picture deterioration of the first few seconds, as it quickly clears up—but after 27 years or so on VHS, I guess I’m lucky that it exists at all. For those of you who do dive in, you’ll see me as the guy using the auger, first in close-up from 1:19 through 1:24, and then in the background from 1:27 through 1:39.

As you can see, my love of daffodils has always been there, enough that I’d volunteer to help plant 20,000 bulbs. Little did I know that I’d someday be heading for that goal on my own property. (more…)

Algis Budrys, or Ajay as he was known to his friends, passed away earlier today. His father was the head of the Lithuanian government in exile, so when Ajay came with him to the U.S. in 1936 at the age of five, he received an early education in seeing the world with outsider eyes. That sense of the alien helped him well in his future writing career. Ajay went on to write many classic novels, notably Who?, Rogue Moon, and Michaelmas.

But he was also a teacher, and that was his role when I first met him in the flesh, as opposed to on the page. It was 1979, and I was a student attending the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Workshop. (My other teachers were Robin Scott Wilson, Carol Emshwiller, Thomas Disch, Damon Knight, and Kate Wilhelm.) Before Ajay decided that Writers of the Future was the preferred path, he had been a strong proponent of the Clarion workshopping method, and he was a wonderful teacher.

But aside from having an excellent understanding of how to build a story, he also helped provide one of the more memorable incidents of my six weeks in East Lansing. (more…)

I had a dream this morning in which I was wandering an unidentified convention, though it had to be a Worldcon somewhere due to the size of the crowds. I passed a room in which people were glued to a marathon of episodes from the Swamp Thing TV show, and then came upon the con suite, which contained lots of neon and included its own pizza oven.

I began to snap pictures of the attendees there. Most of them where unfamiliar faces, but I was being a completist about it. When I went to photograph at the table at which Connie Willis sat, I heard a disconcerting popping sound, and looked at my camera, only to see that the flash was sticking out like the bouncing head from a sprung jack-in-the-box. Oh, great, I thought, the con is just beginning, and here I am without a working camera.

Then, from out of nowhere, who should pop up but Bob Howe, who proceeds to pull out many small tools (it looks to me as if he travels with a lock-picking kit), examine the camera, and tell me exactly what to do to fix it.

What I’d like to know is—just when and why did my subconscious decide that was its symbol of competency?

As I was admiring a turtle wallowing in the mud this evening, and while mulching the bamboo, and then as I walked the boundaries of our acreage, it occurred to me that Irene and I have just celebrated four years here in West Virginia. So for no other reason other than that it amused me to do so, I put together a pie chart to visualize what percentage of my life has been spent in each of the four states I’ve called home.

I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and spent the first thirty years of my life in various apartment buildings and brownstones. But once I moved away from that borough, each jump has taken me to a more rural location. Even though I now live on eight acres, with neighbors barely visible, it occurs to me that I’m very much the same person I was as a child living on Ocean Parkway.

When I attended summer camp as a kid, and we’d visit Marine Park, I would always sneak away as the sides were chosen for whatever was the sport of the day. I’d find a tree worthy of climbing, and sit up there as high as I could in the dappled sunlight for hours—often with a battered paperback—until it was time to go and my camp counselors wandered the park frantically shouting my name. The joy I feel today in this park I’ve built myself is not so very different from what I felt back then, happy as I sat at peace in my pretend woods.

I don’t fool myself into thinking that I’ll remain here for the rest of my life. I’m sure there’ll be more moves to come. But until I’m forced to go, I’ll enjoy watching the size of the West Virginia wedge of that pie chart increase.