A few SFWA members have e-mailed me recently to share that they’d nominated “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man” for a Nebula Award. As pleased I was to learn that the story was liked, according to the Nebula rules, “a work’s eligibility period begins on the first day of the month of its first publication in the United States.” Since PostScripts is a UK magazine, that story’s eligibility period won’t begin unless and until someone decides to reprint it over here.

But that doesn’t hold true for the Stoker Awards, as HWA’s rules don’t contain a U.S. publication requirement. On the other hand, another thing that HWA doesn’t have is the 12-month rolling eligibility period that SFWA does, which means that my story’s eligibility will shortly run out, always a problem for those pieces which appear late in the year. So if there are any HWA members out there who’d like to see a copy, raise your hand.

Entertainment Weekly reports that the top market for buyers of DVDs in the U.S. is—Salt Lake City! According to the magazine’s “By the Numbers” sidebar, 73% of adults there purchased DVDs during the past year.

Why should the capital of Utah turn out to be the nation’s DVD leader? Entertainment Weekly doesn’t attempt to explain the statistic.

Any suggestions?

For years, the perceived wisdom surrounding Raymond Carver’s life and writing was that once he sobered up and found his true love, not necessarily in that order, his work became richer, wiser, and more compassionate. This was visible in more than just his later stories, because he even revisited some of his earlier ones, expanding them from bleak to life-affirming. My favorite of these was the transformation of the cold “The Bath” into the warm “A Small, Good Thing,” which become a much better story for what we all thought was his later editing of it.

Our understanding of the how and why of Carver’s apparent maturation changed forever when D. T. Max published the article “The Carver Chronicles” in The New York Times. The world learned then that those later, more expansive stories were not so much revised as freed from a prison built by Carver’s early editor, Gordon Lish. As reported in the current issue of The New Yorker, here’s how Lish treated the contents of the short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love:

… two stories had been slashed by nearly seventy per cent, many by almost half; many descriptions and digressions were gone; endings had been truncated or rewritten …

So it turned out that what we saw over the years hadn’t been a maturation of Carver’s writing after all, but rather a development of his ability to break free from the editor who had discovered him. What we’d thought were revisions weren’t actually revisions; they were restorations. Carver’s correspondence shows just how torn he was by this. On July 8, 1980, he wrote:

You have made so many of these stories better, my God, with the lighter editing and trimming. But those others, those three, I guess, I’m liable to croak if they came out that way. Even though they may be closer to works of art than the original and people be reading them 50 years from now, they’re still apt to cause my demise, I’m serious, they’re so intimately hooked up with my getting well, recovering, gaining back some little self-esteem and feeling of worth as a writer and a human being.

Up until now, I’ve only seen snippets of the actual editing done by Lish, but The New Yorker, thanks to the brouhaha over the possible publication of the collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in a de-Lished state, gives us the before and after of what may be Carver’s most famous story. (more…)

Back in 1896, the editors of Scribner’s Magazine Illustrated had great hopes for the future. In the December issue of that year, now 111 years ago, they seemed sure that war was a thing of their past, that “it begins to seem possible that a great police force may keep the peace of Europe, and promote, if not actually compel, the peace of all the world.”

The editors felt that “peace on earth, good-will toward men” was in their future, not knowing that World War I, World War II, and all the other wars between and since were still to come. As a result, I’m afraid that I can’t be quite so sanguine about our own future. But I’ll do my best to imagine, if only for today, a world in which such hope was possible.

I’ll at least try.

Merry Christmas to you, too!

I’ve been living in Christmas Past today instead of Christmas Present, thanks to my collection of old magazines from the beginning of last century. I’ve been reading the December issues of Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, Scribner’s Magazine Illustrated, The Cosmopolitan, and other popular publications of the day in search of Christmas spirit.

My first find, however, is rather horrifying. The December 1900 issue of Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly printed a poem that is now so dated in its outlook that half the time I’m recoiling from it in horror and the rest of the time I’m just grateful that we’ve progressed somewhat as a society in the century since.

Here, from the pen of Frank L. Stanton, who was named Poet Laureate of Georgia in 1925, is the poem “Christmas Gif!” If I’ve figured out the LiveJournal cut tool properly, those of you who’d rather not travel in time to such an ignorant past can skip the experience and wait for me to unearth something a bit more enlightened.

Here’s a list of what America read slightly over a century ago, as compiled by The World’s Work and reported in its July 1901 issue. (Thanks to Michael J. Ward for bring this list to my attention.) These bestsellers are based on reports from book dealers of the day in Kansas City, Buffalo, Washington, Albany, Toronto, New Haven, Cincinnati, Rochester, Boston, Philadelphia, Louisville, St. Paul, Chicago, Indianapolis, Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, New York, Cleveland and Pittsburgh:

1. The Helmet of Navarre, by Bertha Runkle
2. The Visits of Elizabeth, by Elinor Glyn
3. Alice of Old Vincennes, by Maurice Thompson
4. Penelope’s Irish Experiences, by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
5. The Octopus, by Frank Norris
6. Eben Holden, by Irving Bacheller
7. Truth Dexter, by Sidney McCall
8. Graustark, by George Barr McCutcheon
9. The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay, by Maurice Hewlett
10. In the Name of Woman, by Arthur W. Marchmont
11. Quincy Adams Sawyer, by Charles Felton Pidgin
12. Monsieur Beaucaire, by Booth Tarkington
13. Like Another Helen, by George Horton
14. Sky Pilot, by Ralph Connor
15. The Turn of the Road, Eugenia Brooks Frothingham
16. Juletty, by Lucy Cleaver McElroy
17. Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington
18. Uncle Terry, by Charles Clark Munn
19. Sir Christopher, by Maud Wilder Goodwin
20. Every Inch a King, Josephine Caroline Sawyer
21. The Story of Sarah, by M. Louise Forsslund
22. Betsy Ross, by Chauncey C. Hotchkiss
23. The Cardinal’s Snuff Box, Henry Harland
24. Miss Pritchard’s Wedding Experience, by Clara Louise Burnham
25. Crucial Instances, Edith Wharton
26. Clayton Halowell, by Francis W. van Praag
27. In Search of Mademoiselle, by George Gibbs
28. A Carolina Cavalier, George Cary Eggleston
29. Nell Gwyn, Comedian, Frank Frankfort Moore
30. A Sailor’s Log, by Robley D. Evans

A confession—I consider myself literate, and yet I’ve never read any of these. I’ve only ever heard of seven of them. The only one I feel I ought to read is the Booker T. Washington. Perhaps I shouldn’t consider myself so literate after all.

Are the bestsellers of 2008 likely to fare any better in 2115?

The Motion Picture Association of America, the organization that not only rates the films that we see inside theaters but also has veto power over what’s allowed to hang outside of them, just rejected a poster for the release of the award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. The film, about the current use of torture everywhere from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay, has already won best documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival, and is shortlisted for the Academy Award.

The poster image is based on a news photo of two U.S. soldiers walking away from the camera with a hooded detainee between them. The MPAA objects to the hood, deeming it inappropriate to be seen by children.

As I think about the issue, what comes to mind—apart from the ridiculousness of allowing any organization to wield this sort of power—is the following question:

Can anyone out there point to a similar situation in book publishing? While there’s no uber-organization in publishing which can veto a book cover, it’s possible that a chain could refuse to carry an individual book if the cover was deemed by them to be inappropriate, resulting in a publisher making alterations lest it suffer financial harm. I know that in magazine publishing, covers that have been considered too risque have been yanked from certain chains, but what about books?

Anyone out there know of specific examples? Or am I imagining an issue where there is none?

The Washington Post recently profiled astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, someone whom I’d previously encountered only on The Daily Show. I guess that speaks to my cultural illiteracy, since Time magazine picked him this year as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Tyson has become a media personality by stepping into the science popularizer role that used to be filled by Carl Sagan.

Near the end of the piece, staff writer David Segal reported on Tyson’s encounter with director James Cameron:

Tyson remembers watching Titanic and noticing that the stars over Kate Winslet’s head as she floated in the ocean were a fictional hodgepodge of constellations—and that the right half of the sky simply mirrored the left half.

“That’s just lazy,” Tyson grumbles. “We know the longitude, the latitude, the time that the Titanic sank. A $50 software program would show you exactly what the night would have looked like.”

When Tyson later met director James Cameron at a NASA conference, he picked this nit. Tyson still remembers Cameron’s reply: “Last time I checked, Titanic sold $1.3 billion worth of tickets, worldwide. Imagine how many more tickets we would have sold if we’d gotten the sky right.”

Touché, Tyson thought.

“What an ass,” Edelman thought. (more…)

I can no longer remember when I copied out this Gene Wolfe quote or from what source I plucked it, but it still feels as true to me now as it was back then … whenever that happened to be. (And if anyone can place the provenance, please raise your hand!)

I don’t think that for any reason except dire economic necessity a writer ought to send out material merely because it’s salable. I think he hurts himself; he hurts the field; he hurts the publication in which the material appears. Mere saleability is the ethics of a KMart. I think writing is an art, and without trying to be too pretentious, I think it ought to have a better set of ethics than an army/navy store.

This comes to mind whenever I think I’ve completed a sufficient number of drafts to feel comfortable releasing a story into the wild.

Because an inner voice then pipes up, asking, “Are you sure?”

Time Magazine, as part of a feature offering 50 Top 10 Lists of 2007, shares its choices for the year’s Top 10 Magazine Covers.

The winner?

The January 2007 issue of Texas Monthly, which played off National Lampoon‘s famous January 1973 issue, the one which featured the tagline “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog!”

As far as newsstand inspirations go, that original cover has been alluded to by subsequent magazines more times than any other. Its only possible competitors for that record might be the often-spoofed Janet Jackson Rolling Stone cover or the Demi Moore Vanity Fair cover.

I wasn’t as impressed with this particular cover as much as others seem to have been, regardless of the quality of the Dick Cheney photoshopping, perhaps because that allusion has by now been so overdone as to have become a cliche.

I keep hoping that someday a science fiction, fantasy, or horror magazine will pull off a design coup and make one of these lists. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.