In the latest issue of Locus, Liz Hand, the award-winning author of “Last Summer at Mars Hill” and Generation Loss, had this to say about her approach to her art:

In The Red Shoes, Michael Powell’s wonderfully over-the-top film that buys into all this stuff about the transcendence of art, Lermontov (a dance impresario based on Diaghlev), has a great line: “Madame, I do not care to see my religion practiced by amateurs.” That’s sort of how I feel about it. If you’re not going to bring a certain seriousness of intent and practice to your vocation, why are you doing it? Millions of people don’t feel that way, but for me, art is the closest I can come to a religious experience.

That’s sort of how I feel about it, too. I don’t think of writing as my profession, my trade, or my craft. I think of it as my calling. (more…)

I returned yesterday from the balmy 80s of Florida to the chilly 40s of home, and on my way back from the airport stopped at Sandy and Risa Stewart’s house for this year’s Writers Group From Hell annual holiday party (which included the traditional groan-inducing white elephant swap).

I’m no longer an active member of this monthly critiquing group, but I was one of its founding members back in 1989, and so get grandfathered in for the party, along with a number of other lapsed workshoppers.

The WGFH was born in Logan Airport on the way back from that year’s World Science Fiction Convention in Boston. I overheard someone utter the word “Clarion” as I waited to board the plane, and ended up wandering the gate in search of the speaker. I eventually connected with Sue Ellen Sloca, who was either a fellow graduate of that writing program, or just trying to get advice on whether or not to go in the future. We decided to try to pull others from the Maryland/Virginia/District of Columbia area into our orbit and begin a critiquing group, which started a couple of months later.

(If I’m misremembering the details, I hope that one of the other members will leap in to correct me.)

I had to abandon regular workshopping back in 1992 or 1993, when editing Science Fiction Age started to eat my life, but I still think back fondly on those several years of monthly meetings, back before anyone had thought to give our workshop a name.

It never felt like Hell to me.

As a followup to yesterday’s post about my father’s 75th birthday, here we are before the celebration begins, both miles and years away from that shot of Coney Island.

I look forward to our roles being reversed, and him showing up decades from now to help celebrate my 75th!

My father, Barney Edelman, turns 75 today. Here he is as a teenager on the beach at Coney Island, several years before I came into the world. I believe that he’s sixteen. That’s the parachute drop and the boardwalk behind him, and it’s about as iconic a photo of Coney Island, or of him, as you can get. The past year been rough for him, with many health challenges, so I’m thrilled that he’s still here with us today. Whatever has happened in the decades since a friend of his snapped this photo on the beach, this is how Dad will always be in my heart and head—handsome, smiling, triumphant.

I’m not the only one who embraces what this photo represents. Amazingly, strangers have taken to it, too. Thanks to the Internet, this picture was just printed in the latest issue of Quintessentially, a high-end British magazine. (more…)

I had a dream last night in which I had been summoned to see Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, but had no idea why. I went to his hotel, at which I found him surrounded by his minions, some of whom were massaging his feet. He had me sit on a couch opposite him, and instructed two of his helpers to remove my shoes and massage my feet as well. While we sat there, we talked about science fiction and fantasy. I thought, as I looked at him over the foot massagers, this is a little weird, but hey, it’s Peter Jackson!

Then he got to the real purpose of his invitation. It had absolutely nothing to do with me—he’d been trying to reach one of my writers, Eric Baker, a longtime friend whose fiction and non-fiction I’ve been publishing as far back as the Science Fiction Age days, and who I’d met long before that. Jackson said that the phone and e-mail information he had for Eric didn’t work, and he hoped I had better and more recent info, because he really needed to get in touch with him.

So I pulled out my BlackBerry and searched for Eric’s entry in my address book, but for some reason, no matter how I typed in his name, I couldn’t find it. Other friends and writers kept popping up, but Jackson didn’t want them, only Eric, and there was no Eric. I woke still looking, with Jackson being very disappointed, and me being disappointed I was disappointing him.

Sorry, Eric—I guess this means Jackson won’t be calling you about that gig!

Since I wrote of war yesterday, I should write of love today, since those are the two places in which we’re told that all is fair, right?

So to balance out what Tim O’Brien had to say about the war story, here’s what Jane Smiley, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres, has to say of love stories:

A love story, at least a convincing one, requires three elements: the love, the beloved, and the adventures they have together. If the lover isn’t ardent, then the story isn’t a love story. If the beloved isn’t appealing, then the lover just seems idiosyncratic or even crazy; and if they have no adventures, then their love is too easy, and they have no way of learning anything important about themselves and one another.

These two quotes would appear to be mutually exclusive, in that one couldn’t write a story in which characters learn important things about themselves while at the same time avoiding making any moral statement (now there’s a challenge for you!), but still, they’re both worth keeping in the backs of our minds as we write.

Tim O’Brien was recently referenced in the New York Times Book Review with the following moving quote from his novel The Things They Carried:

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest proper models of human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.

Three things came to mind when I read this:

First, that The Things They Carried is one of those books I know I should have read a long time ago, and always felt bad that I hadn’t. It makes me think that I should put together a list of my top ten “always meant to get to but somehow never found the time” novels and start finding that time.

Second, that a part of me was simultaneously glad I hadn’t yet read it, because otherwise I would have had that memorable passage in mind as I wrote the following section from the story of mine I referred to in an earlier entry: (more…)

I’ve been going to conventions since I was fifteen. I started with Phil Seuling’s July 4th comic-book cons, but quickly moved on to science-fiction ones as well. I lived in Brooklyn back then, which meant that I had plenty of Manhattan cons to choose from, and as soon as I discovered them, I went to as many as I could.

During those first few years, I’d go to as many panels as possible, and always sit in the front row, hoping to learn the secrets of the universe. As soon as the panels would end, I’d pop up to get autographs of each participant in a sketchbook I always carried. (Yes, that’s right. I was one of those.) Last night, while searching for something completely different, I came across the sheet below, which I believe was from the 1972 LunaCon. It immediately brought me back to those early days I spent wandering the Statler Hilton Hotel, when gods still walked the Earth.

The first column includes autographs from Lester Del Rey, Arthur C. Clarke, John Jakes, Baird Searles, and Gordon R. Dickson … but then there’s a final name I can’t identify. The first name seems to begin with an “F” (Fred? Frank?), but it might also be a “J,” and the last name starts with a “W”, with (maybe) a crossed “t” at the end. I looked through the Ws in various SF encyclopedias, and couldn’t find a name that appeared to match the scrawl. Anyone have an idea who that could be?

The second column starts with someone named Marilyn Chris, but I can’t remember who that was, or why I got her autograph. The only Marilyn Chris I can uncover is a soap-opera star—but why would she have been at a LunaCon? She doesn’t seem to have starred in anything science-fictional. Is there another Marylyn Chris out there? After that is another mystery name, what looks like Robert S. Kalb or Kalf—but who is that? Again, Googling hasn’t helped. Then come the familiar names—Richard E. Peck, L. Sprague de Camp, Charles Manson, George Alec Effinger, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Hans Stefan Santesson, and Frank Belknap Long.

And no, Charles Manson wasn’t really at a science-fiction convention. That’s the signature of Merry Prankster Paul Krassner, infamous for (among other things) having published Wally Wood’s Disneyland Memorial Orgy centerspread, back when he was the editor of The Realist.

Any idea who those three mystery panelists were? Does anyone have an old program book which could clear things up?

I’m behind on reading Publishers Weekly, so I’ve only just caught up with the November 5 issue, which includes the magazine’s choices for the 150 Best Books of the Year. The categories used are Fiction, Poetry, Mystery, SF/Fantasy/Horror (all rolled into one), Romance, Comics, NonFiction, Religion, Religious Fiction, Lifestyle, Children’s Picture Books, Children’s Fiction, Children’s NonFiction, and Children’s Comics. There were aspects of the list I found puzzling, but then, I always get confused when walls are built between genres.

Which brings me to a few questions:

If Ellen Datlow‘s state-of-the-art horror anthology Inferno is included in the SF/Fantasy/Horror category, why is Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box, indisputably a horrific ghost story, counted as Fiction?

What’s the reason that In War Times, Kathleen Ann Goonan’s WWII alternate history story, is considered SF/Fantasy/Horror, when Jamestown, Matthew Sharpe’s post-apocalyptic re-imagining of the Jamestown settlement, is considered Fiction?

Why is Kay Kenyon’s Bright of the Sky, about an accident that sends a family into an alternate reality, counted as SF/Fantasy/Horror, but Liz Maverick’s Wired, a cyberpunk story of a computer programmer hunted by strange men who can alter reality, painted a Romance?

Was J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows listed as Children’s Fiction rather than simply Fiction because you’re unlikely to ever see an adult reading it? (more…)

I just received advance copies of the February 2008 issue of SCI FI magazine, which won’t be officially on sale until December 10. Zachary Quinto’s face isn’t on the cover due to a Heroes article—he’s there because we decided to make our cover feature this time around a sneak peek at the upcoming Star Trek film. It’s by far the longest lead sneak peek we’ve ever done, since the film is still more than a year away.

Also covered in the issue are the movies Cloverfield, The Water Horse, One Missed Call, Fanboys, The Eye, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and Jumper, plus the new TV series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Ghost Hunters International. (more…)