Shredding hundreds of pages torn from notebooks filled by my teen and twentysomething self causes me to reminisce about my collaboration with artist P. Craig Russell which could have been, the poem 18-year-old me wrote about Action Comics #1, my mysterious mid-’70s New Jersey comic convention meeting with Anthony Bourdain, why when it comes to the process of writing I’m a voyeur but not an exhibitionist, the complete lyrics to a song I had Rick Jones sing way back in Captain Marvel #50, my joy upon seeing Superman co-creator Joe Shuster’s name in my old address book, how the Grim Reaper might have prevented my Scarecrow from being born, and much more.

You can eavesdrop on those memories via the embed below or download at the site of your choice.

Here are some images which will enrich your listening experience, though they probably won’t make much sense without it —

Rick Jones sings my song in Captain Marvel #50 (May 1977)

Complete lyrics for “Champagne People”
written December 12, 1973

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I plucked Eric Choi‘s short story “From a Stone” out of the slush pile to publish in the September 1996 issue of Science Fiction Age, and our paths have unfortunately rarely crossed since. When he popped by my kaffeklatch during the Glasgow Worldcon last year, that was probably the first time we’d had the chance to chat face to face in decades. So when I heard he planned to also attend Capclave in Rockville, MD, where I’m a regular, I took that as a sign.

Choi was the first recipient of the Asimov Award (now the Dell Award) for his novelette “Dedication.” He also won the Aurora Award for his short story “Crimson Sky,” and a 2023 Sidewise Award for Best Short Form Alternate History for his novelette “A Sky and a Heaven”. His short story collection Just Like Being There was published in by Springer Nature in 2022. He edited the anthologies The Dragon and the Stars with Derwin Mak in 2010 (winning a 2011 Aurora Award in the category of Best Related Work) and Carbide Tipped Pens: Seventeen Tales of Hard Science Fiction with Ben Bova in 2014.

He’s also an alumnus of the International Space University.  Over the course of his aerospace engineering career, he’s worked on a number of space projects including QEYSSat (Quantum Encryption and Science Satellite), the Meteorological (MET) payload on the Phoenix Mars Lander, the Canadarm2 on the International Space Station, the RADARSAT‑1 Earth-observation satellite, and the MOPITT (Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere) payload on the Terra satellite. In 2009, he was one of the Top 40 finalists (out of 5,351 applicants) in the Canadian Space Agency’s astronaut recruitment campaign.

We discussed what William Shatner’s Captain Kirk might sound like dubbed into Cantonese, the wonders of fan-run science fiction conventions, how the Asimov competition gave him the courage to make his first submission, what it was like co-editing an anthology with the great Ben Bova, the accident that gave birth to his first short story collection, why his claim never to have experienced writer’s block comes with a footnote, his moving memories of the Columbia accident as experienced at the Kennedy Space Center, the Richard Feynman quote he shared throughout the pandemic, why the first Harry Turtledove story he read wasn’t written by Harry Turtledove, his unfortunate introduction to The Lord of the Rings, and much more.

Here’s how you can join us for lunch at Rockville’s Lebanese Taverna — (more…)

While digging through a box of papers from the ’70s in search of some information about my time at the 1979 Clarion Writers Workshop — which I needed as background for Episode 13 of my Why Not Say What Happened? podcast — I stumbled upon handwritten notes for a comics story which eventually appeared in the DC mystery book Secrets of Haunted House #11. And while studying my scrawl, I learned something surprising — more four years before “Picasso Fever” was published in that May 1978 cover-dated comic, I’d pitched it to Marvel for one of the company’s black-and-white magazines.

And not only that, but the date on those notes was April 21, 1974 — slightly more than two months before my start date at Marvel of June 24, 1974.

If you’d asked me last week when I’d begun pitching ideas to any of the Marvel editors, I’d have told you it wasn’t until after I was on staff, but here was evidence my memory was wrong, for I discovered multiple story ideas with accompanying notes indicating I was trying to sell to Marv Wolfman and Tony Isabella in March and April of 1974.

I decided to talk about this on Episode 14 of Why Not Say What Happened?, but thought it would also be interesting for comics historians to see that original plot compared with the story which eventually followed.

Why did Marvel editor Tony Isabella pass in 1974 and DC editor Paul Levitz eventually give me the go-ahead, even though for the most part, the early plot is almost identical to the later story? After all this time, there’s no definite answer for that.

It could be I was a better writer at age 23 in 1978 than I was at 19 in 1974, and the written pitch I submitted — which was obviously not the handwritten spread below — presented a better case, with more dramatic pacing and more descriptive word choices. Or it could be the eternal truth for all rejections — that the concept simply wasn’t right for Marvel’s books, but fit in with the DC editorial vision.

I suspect a little bit of both.

All this being said, I’ve transcribed my notes for a six-page story so you could read them against the story itself, which was drawn by John M. Fuller and Bruce Patterson. I hope those artists won’t feel disrespected if I mention the artist I had in mind as I wrote this was Alex Nino.

Here are those notes —

And here’s the front cover of that issue, where Michael Kaluta brought my concept to life —

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While destroying hundreds of pages of bad poetry I scribbled as a teenager, I made a few surprising discoveries which cause me to reminisce about my poem “Ode on Comic Book Company Loyalty,” written 18 days after I was hired by Marvel Comics, my extremely rough sketch for the second Scarecrow splash page, my team-up with Quicksilver and 7-Eleven to freeze your brain with Slurpees during the summer of 1975, Tony Isabella’s heavy edit on my early Avengers script assist (and why we should all be grateful), my forgotten horror pitches bounced by Marvel in 1974, and much more.

You can eavesdrop on those memories via the embed below or download at the site of your choice.

Here are some images which will enhance your listening experience, and probably won’t make much sense without it —

My 1975 Park Slope Apartment

My Scarecrow Splash Page Sketch

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