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.

Now that 2007 is winding down, it’s time to look ahead to 2008. Here are the conventions and other writing-related events at which you’ll be able to find me in the coming year. I’ve already made my hotel reservations for the first two of these, since I hate ending up in overflow hotels.

March 27-30
World Horror Convention
Salt Lake City, Utah

April 24-27
Nebula Awards Weekend
Austin, Texas

May 23-26
Balticon 42
Hunt Valley, Maryland

July 17-20
Readercon 19
Burlington, Massachusetts

July 24-27
Comic-Con International
San Diego, California

August 6-9
Denvention 3: 66th World Science Fiction Convention
Denver, Colorado

October 17-19
Capclave
Rockville, Maryland

October 30-November 2
World Fantasy Convention
Calgary, Canada

I might end up attending Philcon as well, but until the convention committee finalizes its hotel contracts as well as its date—which is traditionally in either November or December—I can’t say for sure whether I’ll be able to make it.

A research request from a colleague sent me scurrying back to The Patchin Review, a magazine edited and published by Charles Platt from 1981 through 1983. While skimming through my yellowing copies, I ran across the following item, which had nothing at all to do with my search, in issue number five, dated October-December 1982:

ED FERMAN of F&SF says his latest poll shows a drastic drop in teen readers since 1970—seems they’re playing videogames instead of reading books.

And that’s a report from a quarter of a century ago, when the state-of-the-art home videogames were Space Invaders and Donkey Kong!

I’d hate to think what a contemporary poll might reveal. If teen readers could be stolen away from fiction magazines by the gaming graphics of the early ’80s, so primitive in retrospect, what chance do they have of retaining them in the face of such current gaming juggernauts as Halo 3 and Mass Effect?

It’s a battle that’s being debated elsewhere, but this nugget is a reminder of just how long the war has been raging.

I just ran across a 2005 post which appeared at The Comics Reporter site in which comic-book personalities were asked to share famous industry events at which they wish they’d been flies on the wall, such as “Sit in on a Lee/Kirby or Lee/Ditko plotting session, circa 1963” and “Joe and Jerry signing the contract to give Superman to DC.”

Which got me thinking—what science-fiction events would I have wanted to witness as a fly on the wall? Here are the first five that came to mind:

The discussion in which Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. inspired Isaac Asimov to create his classic story “Nightfall.”

Jack Williamson’s face at the newsstand that day in 1928 upon seeing his creature from “The Metal Man” illustrated on the cover of Amazing and realizing that he must have made his first fiction sale—only no one had bothered to tell him!

The screening George Lucas held for friends such as Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma of a rough cut of Star Wars before the special effects were laid in.

Don Wollheim, Frederik Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth and others as they were being ejected from the first World Science Fiction Convention in 1939 by Sam Moskowitz and Will Sykora as part of one of the earliest fan feuds.

Daniel Keyes bringing the manuscript of “Flowers for Algernon” over to the apartment of Horace Gold, and listening as the agoraphobic editor of Galaxy told him that he needed to change the ending to make it more upbeat.

I can think of many other moments I’d like to have witnessed. How about you?

Since I recently shared two examples of the kind of annoying kid I used to be back when I’d badger writers and artists for autographs and sketches, I figured that it was only fair to reveal what they saw when they were under attack.

So here’s a picture of that pest, which was published in the 1972 program book for Phil Seuling’s famed New York Comic Art Convention, held each year over the July 4th weekend at the Statler Hilton Hotel. I’m the one slightly to the right of center, sitting in the front row at a panel the previous summer. I was 16. Back then, I’d attend programming nonstop, and would always sit in the front row, absorbing all the behind-the-scenes knowledge I could. (Some of it actually sank in.)

Note the long hair, leather headband, and denim jacket with metal studs and patches saying things like War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things.

That little squirt to the left? My younger brother, Lee, who was only 12 at the time!

I’m may be the last one to have heard the news, but Jerry Robinson, who met Bob Kane, the creator of Batman, back in 1939, and who was instrumental in the creation of such members of the Dark Knight’s supporting cast as Robin and the Joker, has been named a Creative Consultant at DC Comics.

I’m a little unclear as to what his exact duties will be, but Paul Levitz, DC Comics’ President and Publisher, has been quoted as saying that, “It’s an honor to have Jerry complete his journey from DC’s bullpen to advising us on characters he was intimately involved with, and the international world of comics he knows so well.”

The announcement brought back memories of a long-ago night—January 5, 1972, to be exact—when I attended the infamous event, Stan Lee at Carnegie Hall. Back then, I was still one of those annoying kids with a sketchbook, badgering artists and writers at conventions and other SF and comics-related events for drawings and autographs. Jerry Robinson was in the audience that night, probably hoping for a relaxing evening with his family and his peers watching the Marvel Bullpen make fun of themselves on stage. Until, I came along, that is, thrusting my sketchpad and marker toward him.

Instead of telling me to get lost those 35 years ago, he was kind enough to do this quick sketch of Robin (whose name he’d come up with because of his childhood encounters with Robin Hood) telling me that he hoped I’d join him in comics.

The Boy Wonder’s wishes came true, because amazing, though I never anticipated it at the time, a few years later—I did!

Now that Des Lewis has revealed the identity of my Zencore! story, I’m free to compile a complete list of my fiction publications for 2007. I had five stories come out this year, which is the most I’ve seen published in a single year since 2002 (which also saw five).

Their titles are:

“Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man”
PostScripts #12
Pete Crowther, editor

“The Awful Truth About the Circus”
Zencore!
Des Lewis, editor

“A Judgment Call for Judgment Day”
A Dark and Deadly Valley
Mike Heffernan, editor

“The Man He Had Been Before”
The Mammoth Book of Monsters
Stephen Jones, editor

“Survival of the Fittest”
Summer Chills
Stephen Jones, editor

Looking ahead to 2008, I currently have four stories in the pipeline at various magazines and anthologies. Stay tuned as their release dates solidify.

Six months after the publication of an unidentified short story of mine in Zencore! earlier this year, editor and publisher Des Lewis has finally pulled back the curtain on his contributors. So now I can reveal that I was the writer of the story “The Awful Truth About the Circus,” which up until now has been out there in the world with no attribution. Here’s some of what has been said by those who had no idea who wrote the story.

First up, Jetse de Vries, who tried to match up the list of author names with their respective tales. Unfortunately, he got it wrong when he wrote: (more…)

In addition to the passage I shared earlier this week from one of Vladimir Nabokov’s letters in which he dissed poets who are less than serious about their art, here’s another quote that I copied out long ago.

His target in this letter? Editors!

It is the principle of editing itself which distresses me.

I shall be very grateful to you if you help me to weed out bad grammar, but I do not think I would like my longish sentences clipped too close, or have those drawbridges lowered which I have taken such pains to lift. In other words, I would like to discriminate between awkward construction (which is bad) and a certain special—how shall I put it—sinuosity, which is my own and which only at first glance may seem awkward or obscure. Why not have the reader re-read a sentence now and then? It won’t hurt him.

Let’s hear it for sinuosity!