{"id":256,"date":"2011-02-13T22:10:36","date_gmt":"2011-02-14T03:10:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/"},"modified":"2011-02-21T15:43:04","modified_gmt":"2011-02-21T20:43:04","slug":"the-only-thing-that-mattered","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/writing\/short-fiction\/the-only-thing-that-mattered\/","title":{"rendered":"The Only Thing That Mattered"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I think that as a child I must have been infected by Theodore Sturgeon, and I&#8217;ve never been the same since. I once read that he considered all of his stories to be on the same subject&#8212;that of love&#8212;and for some reason that seemed like a good idea to me at the time. I agreed that love&#8212;or the lack thereof&#8212;was a central motivator of human interaction, which anyone who has read my stories will probably figure out without me having to tell them. <\/p>\n<p>So once <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/editing\/science-fiction-age\/\"><em>Science Fiction Age<\/em><\/a> was behind me and I sat down to write my own stories again rather than focus on editing those written by others, it was natural that I would choose as my subject &#8220;The Only Thing That Mattered,&#8221; which found a home in the Summer\/Fall 2002 issue of <em>Absolute Magnitude<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>As a former fiction editor, I know how hard it is to sell a story 20,000 words long, and yet, that is the story that inspiration handed me. I&#8217;m thankful that editor\/publisher Warren Lapine was willing to give over 16 pages to it, or just over a quarter of the issue.<\/p>\n<p>I enjoyed seeing my name on the cover, but even more than that, I got a kick out of seeing Jack Williamson&#8217;s name there with mine.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The Only Thing That Mattered&#8221; was reprinted in my SF collection <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/writing\/books\/what-we-still-talk-about\/\"><em>What We Still Talk About<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I think that as a child I must have been infected by Theodore Sturgeon, and I&#8217;ve never been the same since. I once read that he considered all of his stories to be on the same subject&#8212;that of love&#8212;and for some reason that seemed like a good idea to me at the time. I agreed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":257,"parent":13,"menu_order":42,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-256","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/256\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}