I’m behind in reading Locus, so I’ve only just now gotten to the magazine’s interview with Simon Ings from its February 2015 issue. You can read excerpts here, though this section, which resonated with me the most, wasn’t included—

My ex is the agent for Lawrence Durrell’s estate. What’s interesting about Durrell is the amount he threw away. This was a man who could write for his country. He was extraordinarily prolific. But although his body of published work is quite extensive, it’s really tiny compared to what he churned out, and he was very good at throwing stuff away. Because it’s been his centenary, every squirrelly academic from every Midwestem college is saying, “There’s this lost Larry Durrell manuscript that we must publish!” The house is full of bad Larry Durrell, and the agency and the estate are constantly turning down these academics. “He threw this away. The only reason he didn’t discard it in a bin is because he’s a writer and he might need that scene later. This is not for publication.” That’s part of the writer’s job. They published an unpub!ished John Wyndham novel. There’s a reason why it was unpublished. It does him no service whatsoever, because that’s now part of his canon, which is ridiculous because he couldn’t make it work.

Milan Kundera is always on about this: you should be able to lose work.

Why did this passage touch me? Because I’ve been doing my best for years to “lose work,” in part to make sure no future “squirrelly academic” will ever have a reason to make that kind of demand on my heirs. (Not that my work is important enough one ever would, but humor me here.)

My first 25 or so unsold short stories? Destroyed! (Well, save for the first, which I’ve been hanging on to for sentimental reasons.)

My first three unsold novels? Also destroyed!

The first drafts of every other novel or short story I’ve ever written? Save for a few pages from a new piece set aside specifically for the Kickstarter campaign of the anthology Genius Loci—shredded!

I’ve done my best to ensure that any work which doesn’t live up to the rules Kenneth Koch stated in “The Art of Poetry” no longer exists.

As for my early work that did get published but probably shouldn’t have gotten published, well, there’s little I can do about that now save make a promise that while I live it will remain forever uncollected. What happens after I’m gone I know is out of my control.

But what is within my control is to make whatever work no longer says what I want it to say as best as I can say it … disappear.

That Milan Kundera sure is wise. (Simon Ings, too.)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a few more old manuscripts to burn …

I was too busy having fun during the World Fantasy Convention to download the new issue of Locus, so it wasn’t until today that I discovered Dick Kearns had died.

We’d crossed paths several times in the early ’80s because he’d attended Clarion in 1978, the year before I did. I doubt we’d seen each other since the late ’80s, but I remember him as being a good writer and a fun person to hang out with. That’s not why I called you all together, though.

His Locus obituary contained a typo that had me scratching my head at first. But once I figured out what was really meant, I thought … oh, that’s wonderful. Dick would have gotten a kick out of it.

It’s a typo I’m sure someone would have mentioned somewhere online had it been read, but as I haven’t seen any of you mention it, I’m guessing, sadly, that no one’s bothered to read it.

Can you spot the typo?

Did you see it? (more…)

I ran across this photo over at Locus of me and Andy Duncan and Ellen Datlow (with Wil McCarthy in the background) at the 2001 Nebula Awards in Los Angeles, and all I could think was … now there’s an image in desperate need of a caption!

So, friends, it’s up to you to provide one. What could it be that we’re discussing so intently? And more importantly …

What exactly is Ellen measuring with her fingers?

One of the unexpected pleasures of last weekend’s Immortal ConFusion was that someone had dumped several decades worth of Locus back issues on the freebie table, which meant I was able to dig though copies from the ’80s and ’90s and sit round with my friends who were there remarking about how much our absent friends had changed.

One article that amused me contained the results of the annual Locus poll, and what made it especially amusing was that in 1991, the editors decided to be more playful than usual. In addition to being asked which novels, magazines, etc., we most liked, we were also asked, “Which author would you most like to meet, marry, publish or murder?”

While the “meet” and “publish” results were mildly interesting, it’s the “marry” and “murder” answers that appeared in the September 1991 issue that were the most fun.

And the author Locus readers most wanted to marry 22 years ago was …

(more…)

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…)