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!

Perhaps I was a little quick yesterday to discount the characters I’ve worked with over the years at my various staff jobs in publishing, because Pearl Harbor Day brings back memories of Morrie Kuramoto, who I worked with many years ago at Marvel Comics when I was an editorial assistant and he toiled in the production department.

Morrie had worked at the company for so many years that he was jokingly referred to as “The Ancient One.” On Pearl Harbor Day, he would wear a WWII leather pilot’s cap while sitting at his drawing board, and toss paper airplanes at his coworkers and anyone else who happened to pass by. I’m not sure that this sort of thing would be tolerated in today’s politically correct times, but in the Marvel Bullpen, at least back then, you could get away with almost anything.

Morrie is no longer with us, but each time Pearl Harbor Day rolls around, I remember him, and so many of the others who’ve gone on to that great Marvel Bullpen in the sky.

Banzai, Morrie.

Novelist Lydia Millet was interviewed in the November 26th issue of Publishers Weekly on the occasion of the release of her new book, How the Dead Dream.

Here’s how she characterized her time working a staff job in magazine publishing before she chucked it all and devoted herself to her writing—

She did, however, land a copyediting job in Larry Flynt’s magazine empire. “I started out working for a magazine called Fighting Knives, edited by a mercenary in South America, so when they offered me a slot at Hustler, I jumped to the porn side happily.” She sold her first book, Omnivores (Algonquin, 1996) during the two years at Hustler and says she learned a lot from the philosophy of the prisoners who made up a large part of the subscription base. And then there was her gun-running managing editor, a dwarf whose dominatrix visited once a month and destroyed the furniture in his office.

&#151which makes the life of the science-fiction editor seem so mundane by comparison!

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.