The New Asimov’s Is Out! I’ve got the second story in it! Whoo Hoo!

65012_10202227441667201_676869979_n Contributer’s copys came today. I’m the second story in the issue, after the cover story! I’m in the issue with Nancy Kress, my first week Clarion instructor! I’m pretty happy!

I wonder how this one will go over? People kind of liked the first one.

Write Today. Time is Not on Your Side.

writing_process

 

I got this image from Meg Rosoff’s blog, after finishing her delightful and horrific book The Way I LIve now.

It made me laugh very very hard. This gif, not the book. The book made me read it in one day, cry at the end, and go and read about the author. I’m glad she’s not dead. She wrote this book when she was 50, after a life tragedy, and, well, this made me strangely hopeful. Not the tragedy of course. But the writing of a wonderful YA book by a person a half century old who had just suffered a terrible loss.

Because, you know. I’m a half century old.

But now that funny gif is kind of disturbing me. I’m going to put in some spacers to get it to scroll off the page. Follow me down, will you? (I think this post gets positive towards the end.)

 

 

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So, here is the thing

I have never spent my time wisely.

Here is the thing.

I don’t like to think about death, or dying, or things really changing.

And so I don’t spend time as much as I pass it; let it flow. I savor it, pretend it is infinite. I waste it. I revel in it.

I blink in astonishment at my two six foot tall babies. Time. Flowing.

But I don’t plan Time out, or ration it or make any kind of grown up decisions about Doing This vs Doing That.

If I’m honest, though, about my life, about how old I am, 50, and about what I want to try to do, accomplish, say, I have to realize that, I’m out of time to waste. Time is not on my side.

I’m lucky to think I have time, still, to do something, to make some kind of mark. Throughout most of human history, I’d be wrapping it up about now.

One year when I had a job job, typesetting the saddest little four page newsletters you ever laid your eyes on for a business version of a vanity press, I put this big dry-erase ‘year at a glance’ calendar up on a long white wall, and Xed off the days, noting each deadline drop, each piece of ridiculous waste paper designed and delivered.

Staring at the wall, I saw another calendar appear beside it, with the date incrementing, and another, I looked down the long white hall, and I measured the space in my mind and I saw my death out somewhere past the door to the elevator; perhaps in the bar which was strangely just across a small vestibule.

Thank God I was fired.

James Thurber once wrote a book of essays entitled Let Your Mind Alone, in response to the waves of self help books published in the 30s. Yes, we American’s have been trying to Help Ourselves for a long, long time.

In the book, the author is skeptical, of the possibilities of personal transformation, and pleads to be let alone, to be the weird cranky difficult dysfunctional person he is. This has always been my feeling. I identify with my faults as well as my strengths; it’s all me, and really, deep down I love myself in a deeply unfounded, unjustified kind of way I don’t begin to deserve.

If I could hack out all the gooey rotten stuff in me, all the rotten bits, all the dark stuff clogging up my mental plumbing, would the resultant creature even be recognizably me any more?

This is the kind of thing I think about.

In psychiatry this is called maladaptive adjustment. People identifying with their crappy mental states, their crappy diseases.

It’s time for me to recognize the fact that my creative output is too low. My process is filled with daydreaming and giving up when things feel bad, and creeping back and starting up again when the bad feelings lose track of where I am. I say I want to write, and then, the world throws freelance work at me and I say, thank God, I really want to be a grown up and make money. I have children for God’s sake.

I want to write a book as good as How I Live Now. That’s what I want to do. I know I probably can’t. (See Black Gooey Bits above.) Knowing that makes it harder of course, much much harder, but I can’t help knowing it. I just do.

So, if I want to accept, that that is how I am, I have to also become a person who does the work anyway, even though at some level I know it’s hopeless. And in that moment, of acknowledging that it’s hopeless, that I’m not very good, that I’m barely coherent, I relax, and just do it for the sheer fuck all of it.

Maybe it’s a blessing.

Maybe it’s good that I know that I suck–maybe that is the only good thing about me.

Maybe this lets me be pure. Be the Zen archer. Makes me not care where the arrow flies. Lets me stop grasping after the writer I’ll never be. The one who writes good metaphors and similes. The one who captures perfect telling details of setting, of character; the one whose dialog sings. The one who has such a wonderful backstory upon which to draw of struggle and challenge and diversity. Insight! Wit! Wisdom!

I want to write books that make teenagers think life will be worth living, that life will be filled with wonderful and awful adventures; that make people know that their hearts will both undoubtably be broken and just as certainly heal.

So. Given that, I better get writing. I’m 50. The clock is ticking Time isn’t my friend, but I have the blessing of knowing I am probably doomed, so, I’ll do it for fun, for perversity, for my writing friends… and for Sheilla Williams at Asimovs and Warren Lapine and Ed McFadden and Bruce Bethke and Charlie Ryan and Patrick Swensen and a few others who have published me who I am forgetting, who have somehow failed to get the memo about my worthlessness.

A fact for which I am grateful, when I can muster that emotion.

It’s time for get back in the saddle and embarrass the living crap out of myself.

Onward.

 

 

Part 4: How Not to Be A Writer (unless you have to): Post Clarion Blackout

I am not the author of the story being rejected above, but I feel his pain. I have actually written a story with the same premise, a long long time ago. Though my title was more restrained.
I am not the author of the story being rejected above, but I feel his pain. I have actually written a story with the same premise, a long long time ago. Though my title was more restrained.

Why am I calling this series How Not to be a Writer?

It’s embarrassing and awful and stupid and I shudder even saying it, but what the hell. That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. (But may require extensive physical therapy.) I rewrote a beloved story, a nineteen year old piece, Clarion vintage, finding within it a slightly more interesting ending. I then sent it to a market that had rejected it long ago. It sold. I was pleasantly surprised, but I had mixed feelings. I quit for almost twenty years because of that story’s rejection. I had written, “The Last Straw,” on the  slip, (which I stumbled over the other day, with no memory of having written it. Why was I looking at a folder of 20 year old rejections you wonder? Never mind.)

My problem, back then, was that I had gotten ahead of myself.

I remember spilling my guts about my frustration, as to where I was, as a Writer, to Nancy Kress at Readercon sometime during my 19 year hiatus. She’d been my first week Clarion instructor. She said something to the effect that she didn’t really worry about writing  as a career, until it was one. Her expectations for her writing weren’t way out ahead of the reality. She never suffered from my cognitive dissonance. She hadn’t gotten ahead of herself. God I felt like an asshole talking to Kress. Not blaming her, I mean, just listening to myself made me feel like an idiot. Well, that, and the look on her face.

It reminded me of how stupid I felt in therapy.

Back in the 90s, the editors did this thing, with your Clarion stories, where you got hand signed, typed rejections. A professional courtesy; you shucked out the two grand and spent six weeks, and the editors kinda tipped their hat at you, for sticking it out and coughing up six stories. A nice thing, really. But what happens, when Clarion is over, the stories all sent round and you start getting the unsigned half page slips again? After Clarion, I took every rejection to heart. You knew you were being read, you were being seriously considered. I’d been giving it a bit of a go, as a writer, for six or so years, I thought, finishing a few stories a month, sending them out, but I didn’t feel like I was moving fast enough. I submitted my Clarion stories to the four mass-market magazines, one by one, and then, stopped writing.

That’s the ‘how not to be a writer part of my story, and it’s very simple and stupid and howlingly banal, like the end of a 1000 page Steven King novel you sort of loved till it was over, but the way you stop being a writer is by stopping writing.

Which I did.

For nineteen years.

I blogged for a few causes, did some GLBTQ advocacy, wrote a Slate piece on parenting, but basically, I gave up on writing.

I gave up. Was I blackballed? No. Did the editors stop reading my stories? No. Did they come around to my apartment, and destroy my mac with a sledgehammer and call me names? No. Was I imprisoned like Nelson Mandela and denied writing materials? No. I gave up. I had editors who were publishing me, back then, Warren Lapine and Ed McFadden, whose various nationally distributed magazines did everything imaginable to give me hope. Short of hopping on planes and slapping sense into me, they did what they could. It didn’t matter. I had gotten ahead of myself.

Mea culpa.

And so, all stories end in tautology. Here goes.

Wanna write, then write.

Wanna Be a Writer? What does that have to do with anything?

Wanna be rich and famous and loved? Everybody does, and what does that have to do with writing?

How is the experience of writing different, for you or Neil Gaiman or Steven King? Is the blank page they stare at somehow more seductive? That void they fill, different from the void you chuck your prose into? Aren’t we all the exact same, in that blissful no mind moment of creation? Here but not here, awake and aware and asleep all at once, rocked to sleep in the wake of the ongoing flow of the fictive dream?

Or unpleasantly awake, grinding it out, painfully, on the days when it all seems like shit?

Is their blank page really better than yours?

Write if you want to, and write if you have to, and write what you want to write, what you have to write, something that means something to you, so that, just in case there’s no fame and fortune, then, well, you’ve already paid yourself with meaning.

You want to write to a market? Write in a genre? Then you do that; maybe you’re not writing stuff that you yourself would read for pleasure. That’s OK, you can do that too. If you want to. Set your goals, create your metrics, give it a shot, see how it feels, see how you do. I know people doing this with indy pub, who are making serious money at it. That’s cool, too.

But finish what you start, submit what you finish, to editors or publish it yourself, and see what happens.

Need a community, to write for, to write with? Then… build that community. Write to it, and for it. The community you wanted to belong to doesn’t embrace you, after five years? Ten? Get over it as quickly as possible and keep writing; change your game, change the rules, look for meaning, keep moving, don’t stop if you can find a way to keep going with some kind of joy in your heart some sense of purpose.

Veronica Roth, the author of Divergent and its sequels, a best selling YA series, puts it pretty well; that this is the first paragraph of her first in series novel description gives you a sense of how important she thinks this is.

One piece of advice I have is: Want something else more than success. Success is a lovely thing, but your desire to say something, your worth, and your identity shouldn’t rely on it, because it’s not guaranteed and it’s not permanent and it’s not sufficient. So work hard, fall in love with the writing—the characters, the story, the words, the themes—and make sure that you are who you are regardless of your life circumstances. That way, when the good things come, they don’t warp you, and when the bad things hit you, you don’t fall apart.

I’m a James Thurber fan, but I don’t really like his ‘serious’ short fiction very much, the angry drunken couples at party stories. I like his personal writing, his autobiographical sketches, his satire of period stuff I have little knowledge of; his drawings, his doodles, his, well, fluff. A Thurber collection invariably scrapes all the stuff together in a single volume. I wonder sometimes, if his stories were hard to write, and the fluff easy.

I’m just glad he wrote both. Maybe, someday, someone will feel the same about me. Or you.

Wouldn’t that be something?

Excelsior.

 

 

Writing Break: Cambridge Public Library Main Branch

The main branch of the Cambridge Public library is a thing of beauty. It reminds me of the kinds of facilities you’d expect on upscale college campuses; it doesn’t really even feel like the libraries I’m used to; beloved but decrepit, slightly funky smelling spaces filled with battered paperbacks and scratched DVDs and CDS.

There’s a new wing of shining glass and steel,  and an old wing, all gothic and castle like; the new wing is all international machine-for-living style, cool but clean and efficient, with some comfortable seating in front facing the giant eco-window facade, a complex wall of glass and automatic  sun-shades which supposedly make the building cheaper to heat and cool.

It also looks great, and is easy to sit and read near. One of the many failings of the glass-box style of architecture has been sun-related, with miserably dazzled employees shoving whiteboards and cabinets up against windows to shield themselves from atomic-blast-like sunlight. Not so here.

There’s a teen room, with diner-booth like seating and tons of YA books, graphic novels, manga,  DVDs, even a few video games. There is a whole other room of graphic novels in the basement, next to the mystery and science fiction ghettos, but a nice subset lives in the teen room; likewise the children’s floor also houses some some stuff for older kids.

For parents of young children, the children’s floor is a dream of community come true; a huge rug with soft sculpted river-bottom-rounded-rock pattern in tans and browns, dominates one end of the floor where the board books and picture books live, and parents with infants and toddlers and preschool aged kids hang around up there, doing that total immersion parent thing.

On their own floor. You can’t hear them from anywhere else in the building. I would have loved to have used this room with my kids, but they were small before the renovation; now that my kids are teens, I like to go upstairs and watch the parents wrestle with their little creatures now and then. Long enough to remember how exhausting that was, as well as fulfilling, and then slip away back downstairs.

The old brown castle, which was once the whole library, is now a space filled with long wooden tables with plenty of electrical outlets (some don’t work; check before you fully unpack.) One room houses the computers, each cluster of four with it’s own color laser printer. (!) The other room is for people with books, magazines, newspapers, laptops, ipads.

They’re relaxed about food and drink; there are places where conversation is allowed, and quiet areas. The staff is great. The DVD library has thousands of titles, as does the audiobook section.

It’s a great place to be; to write or simply stare into the void.

Writing Break: Dwell Time

Dwelltime, a coffee bar down the street from Cambridge’s only public high school and fabulous main library,  feels bright, open, warm. A single row of tables along one side, and a few at the windows, provide the seating for the large, open single room. Heck, just look at the photo. It’s nice. Kinda zen.

As a jaded people, we are apparently over the expresso machine, we’re over dark roasts, bitter flavors, burnt offerings; now it’s all about the pour over, and an endless series of wine-like adjectives used to describe said medium roasted coffees.There are the usual expensive sandwiches and pastries in a glass case. You sign the ipad cash register with your finger, be prepared for that, or you’ll feel really old and stupid. I tend to just drink in these places because the seven to nine dollar sandwich offends me–for that much money I expect a giant pile of ethnic food. But that’s me. Four dollars for a cup of coffee is about as far as I can go.

I’m old enough to remember when every porcelain cup of coffee cost 35 cents, and they gave you as much as you wanted. It was bottomless. Because honestly, nobody wanted  much of that foul liquid.

Met a writing friend there early and pounded out 1200 words. My body screamed at me for awhile, saying it wanted to sleep till noon, but I told it to hold that thought, and eventually it calmed and quieted and slipped away leaving only the words and the page and the voices in my head.

Dwelltime has virtually no electrical outlets, just one in the corner, and by 8:05 that seat was taken. Fortunately, I was pretty well charged. Do I need to carry an external laptop battery?

I tasted all the wonderful notes that the little card suggested I might, though I confess to being easily placeboed. A nice cold-grew iced coffee.

Here’s Jay’s Reasons to Write Outside Your House

  1. It is embarrassing to nap in public.
  2. It is illegal to fap in public. (if you don’t know what fapping is, read 10,000 rage cartoons on RRedit. I’ll wait.)
  3. Retail spaces are cleaner and better organized than your home. The noise in your head generated by ominous piles of unsorted mail  does not penetrate beyond the walls of your home. Flee that pile.
  4. You are not expected to clean retail spaces.
  5. You cannot do laundry in most retail spaces. (sure, you could wash out your underwear in the bathroom, in a pinch, but hopefully your situation doesn’t require that.)
  6. Attractive people of the whatever gender(s) you prefer will drift about you, reminding your chromosomes that you are still technically alive. These selfish genes help prevent  napping.
  7. Recent studies suggest that studying in different places improves data retention. I’m going to climb out on a limb and suggest that this generalizes to a variety of cognitive  tasks; the noise, the chaos, all of it, breaks The Silence and defeats the blank page.
  8. I could go on and on but it’s time to write. Wish me luck.
  9. Ok, this time I’m really going. Really.

 

Part 3: How not to be a Writer; the Weasels form a Critical Mass

cmass-shirtBeing honest isn’t easy.

Whit’s workshop honestly wore him out. He would become visibly agitated, as he critiqued our stories, his face flushed, his voice raised. And he put so much effort into marking up our manuscripts that somehow, he never wrote much himself, even though a lucky break had let him pursue writing full time for a number of years. (A situation I’ve been in myself; the luck and the not writing.)

Inside us all lives a creator, an editor, and a critic. Engage that critic too fiercely, rev up its engines, and it will crush every nascent naive, sentimental, derivative impulse from the get-go. Watch that internal critic shut the creator down while the editor, and the rest of the world, shrugs.

Could Whit practice what he preached? Not easily. Themed anthologies with deadlines became his salvation. When he did finish and submit stories, they were good. Pretty damned good, when you factored in the fact that he wrote so few. He progressed faster, further, with a handful of stories, than anyone I’ve ever worked with before or since. He seemed to do it through sheer force of will.

He’d raised the stakes for himself with all that critique.

But you could tell, it was painful, caring so much, about how little we could make him care. And so Whit quit the workshop, to write on his own, publishing ten stories over a ten year span. 

I inherited the Weasels. We were of course, at that point, the Witless Weasels, which was our nameless group’s not really name.

My wife and I had moved to Boston from Jamaica Plain, and then, to Cambridge. Ok, we lived on the Cambridge Somerville line across the street from a creepy bomb-shelter of a bar called The Abbey Lounge, but it was Cambridge, dammit. Our living room was huge, under a big skylight on the third floor of a small apartment building. We had two sofas facing each other and a few chairs that sat a dozen people easily. A big dining room table off to one side was perfect for stacking manuscripts.

At the workshop’s most productive stage the table would support five or six piles of short stories, each stack of ten stories somehow impressive. What my friend Anthony Butler once referred to as ‘evidence of industry.’ Every two weeks people would walk in with a stack of laser-printed courier 12 point double-spaced manuscript under one arm, walk out three hours later with a different stack–composed of everyone else’s stories.

The workshop, already important to me, became the focus of my life.

I had more writing time than most. I had split my full time McJob running an imagesetter at a graphic arts service bureau and ended up with four days a week in which to write. (and three 12 hour days to work.) I quit that job and became a half-assed freelancer, which was even more flexible.

I did write, every day, but I had a hard time finishing things. I’d drink a pot of coffee every morning, write five or six thousand words of email or USENET posts (the paleolithic version of Facebook) and finally crank out some fiction.

I’d start every story with high hopes, write a few thousand words, plot it out in my head, and eventually encounter myself on the page, my limitations, my ego, my hang-ups, my misery, my impatience, my insatiable desire for love and acceptance, my inappropriate lust, my weakness, my despair, my anger.

So I’d stop working on that story and start another.

By now the workshop was stable at around 10 people, who were getting to know each other pretty well. I scouted MIT’s science fiction writing class taught by Joe Haldeman for members. I joined a group of local Extropians and Cyrionicists (you know, people who are going to freeze themselves after death.). I started going to local SF conventions and making friends. Somewhere along the way, I made an executive decision, and named the group Critical Mass. Most people liked the name. A few hated it. I decided I could be autocratic, this one time, so we’d have a goddamn name. I suppose this marks the beginning of the workshop’s decline.

The best known writers to come out of that room were Michael Burstein and Mary Soon Lee. Michael was the 1997 John W. Campbell award winner, an Analog author, whose anthology “I Remember the Future is well loved. Fifteen of the 17 stories were nominated for a hugo or nebula award. Mary Soon Lee published seventy two stories over a period of a decade, breaking into Analog, Interzone, and F&SF, and getting a story into David Hartwell’s Best of the Year Anthology. There were other accomplishments, other points of light as well; one of my MIT finds sold a story called The Portable Girlfriend under the name Doug Teirny, which made it into the Years Best Erotica in 1997. Drax  got a piece in Gordon Lish’s The Quarterly. Being discovered by the guy who discovered Raymond Carver? Pretty cool.

Those who stuck with the workshop got somewhere. Always. Maybe only a few sales. But something, everyone got something. Steven Patten, Rick Silva, Dawn Albright, Sandra Hutchinson, Michael McComas, Jenise Aminoff, Sandra Hutchinson, Gil Pilli, Mark Sherwood, Simon Drax. Many of us became close if not exactly friends, united in this effort; colleagues… comrades.

Here is the thing; love and friendship among writers is sometimes conditional on the writing; leave the church of writing, and you’ll leave some friends behind, too. It’s not that you’re shunned, either. The drifting apart is mutual.

But the person who took the workshop to the next level for me, personally, was Mary Soon Lee, and her process.

1. Finish almost everything you start.

2. Workshop everything you finish.

3. Listen to critique, fix any typos or glaring errors that emerge, but don’t rewrite anything unless you feel like it; and you probably won’t. Just send it out to your top magazine choices. If you think it hasn’t a hope in hell of selling to your top markets, send first to smaller presses that like you.

4. Keep it out until it sells or you run out of markets.

This worked for her pretty well.

I started finishing things. Every two weeks, a new story, on the table. They started getting better. I’d sold that first story to Aboriginal SF; after that I sold another ten stories or so; if two more reached publication without the magazines that bought them folding, I would become a SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) Professional science fiction writer.

Um. Professional here doesn’t mean you  make a living; it means you sold three or more short stories (or one novel) to someone who distributed them as books or magazines by the tens of thousands.

The thing is, my internal critics barely let me write at all. Copying Mary Soon Lee forced me to finish all those stories of mine I hated, which I eventually would grow to love as I finished them, and hate again as they were rejected. Then, like Whit, I upped the ante, raised the stakes, and decided to apply to Clarion.

You know. So I could strengthen that internal critical voice.

You see where this is going.

Stay tuned for part 4: Post Clarion Wipeout: Nineteen Years in the Dark

 

 

 

Meaningfully Employed

Financially, being a creative person generally sucks.

Ironically, the reason it sucks is that being creative is fun. Which means that many people want to do it, and that many people will do it for free. We call people who do things for free amateurs, and outside of pornography and the Olympics, amateur isn’t a viable product category.

Most of us need to make a living.

We live in a market culture, and we measure things in dollars and cents; the most important aspects of our lives, how we care for our kids, the quality of our medical care, what schools we attend, what kind of home we live in, all of it boils down to three things, mostly, and that’s money. Money. Money.

The starving artist is a universal cultural trope. ‘Do you want fries with that’ jokes about the fine arts degree haunt every kid who applies to art school. The starving artist is an important meme, for the consumer culture, because what the starving aritst reminds you is that you it is your job to consume culture, not create it.

The starving artist meme reminds you, you’re not qualified. You only get a few years, a few tries, before it becomes obvious that your’e not taking the world by storm. Your hair falls out and your kids grow tall and if you’re still trying to figure out what you’re going to be when you grow up, then, well…

Why bother? We live in a culture that measures us, pokes us, prods us, towards market-oriented success, a culture that quite literally lets people live and die in the street if they mess up on the money thing. Healthcare and housing, in America, are strictly optional. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

So, again, why do it?

Because it means something, that’s why. Meaning. A slippery word, like faith, or love, or honor. Meaning is the real coinage you will be paid in. You will create meaning without intending to; any juxtaposition of cliched story elements pulled out of your ass will radiate meaning in four dimensions, when manipulated with care, a modicum of craft, and a bit of sincerity.

You don’t have to be smart. You don’t have to be talented. You just have to do the work, and the meaning oozes out of the process, and into your life. Into every moment of your life. Everything that happens to you. Everything that happens to everyone else. Every newspaper story you read. Everything you imagine. All these every things suddenly matter. Because they can be built into stories. True stories can be stripped down, repainted, refurbished, used for parts. Experience is analogized; allegory transforms one thing into another; everything becomes a metaphor for something else, and now you have a creative universe of Everything squared, Everything to the Everything.

The meaning of your writing, though, becomes more apparent, when it is shared.

Maybe a painter can see his own painting, can paint for herself and God; as a writer, somehow, your work doesn’t  exist until someone else runs it through their brain.

Writing for yourself is masturbation. Nothing wrong with that! Healthy, in fact, like Meditation. But writing for others, well, that’s sex. Two minds encountering each other, on a page.

The only known cure for solipsism; reading something you know for sure you could never have written.

You  pay yourself for writing with meaning. Eventually, others will probably pay you something, too, if you keep at it. Money. Publication. Friendship.

And in the end, if you’re lucky, and sometimes even if you’re not, a readership.

Twenty years after sending my first story in to Asimov’s and getting a pre-printed half-slip of paper back in a stamped self-addresed envelope, I’m a new writer. Goddamn strangers are reading my stories and emailing me about them.

And for the first time in a long time I feel meaningfully employed.

 

 

The Making and Breaking of The Weasles

Let’s return to a time before I had children, before I went to Clarion, before the internet bubble, before my so-called professional identity, before we had a mortgage and a car. I was a guy who’d scraped by for over a decade, in high-school, and college, and after a series of, oh, let’s call them medical problems, finally graduated from Syracuse University with a B average and a BFA.

Only took me the seven years.

Anyway, my first writing group dissolved, a few meetings, a few pieces, important, but transitory. My friendship with Ron and Marty Hale Evans continues to this day, but Steven Burke, his novel about the doomed Red Sox and the Crows, and the Vogon Poet, are long gone.

I do not remember how I found Whit Pond’s nameless group. Was it a flyer in a bookstore? Maybe the Science Fiction bookstore Pandemonium in Harvard Square? I took the Orange line to downtown crossing, caugth the red line and traveled through Cambridge into Somerville, Porter Square. I emerged from the insanely deep subway stop, up the three sets of escaltors, following directions from the flyer carefully, ending up at  new-england ranch house. The houses in Somerville reminded me vaguely of the those in suburban central New York, but the lots they inhabited seemed shrunken, the yards tiny patches of weeds or concrete blocks, the houses packed in side by side in a frightful density. Insufficient tree cover made the neighborhood look a little washed out, dingy.

Still, it was nicer than were I lived, in a brownstone apartment building in Jamaica plain.

The man who opened the door for me was middle aged, thick in the middle, with longish receding graying hair. He had a mild southern accent and radiated a calm and determined intelligence. He shook my hand, smiled somewhat sadly, and welcomed me to the group.

Whit’s critique group style was anarchy. We didn’t take turns. We interrupted each other. We shared a few stories every two weeks, and we talked about what was wrong with them. We didn’t talk about what was right with them, for a few reasons. One, there wasn’t much good about them. Two, Whit was a brutally honest critic, and he set the tone for the group.

Whit told us, over again, he didn’t care. We weren’t making  him care.

“I don’t like your characters. I don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t care about them. I don’t care about what’s happening. By page ten, I hate everyone. I’m hoping they all die horribly,” was what he told us, mostly, and mostly, it was true.

Whit’s critiques were breathtaking. The word flensing comes to mind. They made my heart hammer and my palms sweat. They hurt. And you knew, though, that Whit was only being honest. He liked science fiction, he liked stories. He just didn’t like yours. And, after Whit had pointed out their failings, neither did you.

And so I started to think, seriously, and continuously, about why we care about the stories we read. The made up people in the them. The bullshit situations. The make believe worlds. And suddenly, science fiction, a literature of ideas, became to me something else entirely; writing was really about character and emotion. Why do we care? Why do we care?

Every word I write now passes through that filter. Why should anyone care?

Workshoppers came and went; not many people could stand more than a few Whit crits, a few whittings. But one day, a pretty young woman showed up, in the pouring rain, seven months pregnant, looking like she was going to pass out. We brought her in, and listened to her. Let’s call her Rain. She’d sold a story to a goddamn magazine, to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy magazine, a story called Black Ribbon.

She brought a copy to a meeting, and I read it. A lovely short  story about a cursed, imprisoned girl, bewitched into something toxic. Finally she is sent out by the people imprisoning her, to go to a dance, a ball. Where she dances with a host of royals, all of whom will be killed by her embrace. She’s just happy to be out of the house, dancing. Creepy. Weirdly moving.

I cared. It was good. And this woman had written it.

She taught us about the rules of workshopping, which she’d done before with actual writers who actually published things. She was  like some ancient goddess bringing fire to a bunch of grunting cave men. We would take turns. We would not interrupt each other. We would use a timer. The author would speak at the end. We would go around the circle. And then, with her in place, the group began to solidify; people started coming back, week after week.

Rain’s life, as it turned out, was a shambles. She’d been impregnated and abandoned by her worthless hippy husband, who had taken all her friends with him when he left her. She’d clawed her way from the bottom of a pit of murderous depression to come to the workshop that night, struggling with pregnancy releated blood pressure issues, staggering through the damn rain to bring the grunting cavemen fire. She came and she kept coming. She brought her baby with her a few times, because she didn’t have a lot of resources, being far from her family in Ohio. She dated one of the guys in the group for awhile, a strange angry bearded man named Jeff.

I talked her up to my friend Peter. They were married the day after I came back from Clarion.

First and foremost, though, Rain was a writer, who had sold a story to a magazine, and she knew how a workshop should be run. Whit, it must be said, took her advice, and while it didn’t soften his critique, somehow,he became more bearable, because his became  just one of a set of opinions given roughly equal weight. He still set the tone, but the group was now bigger than just him. The people who stuck were the people who could keep bringing stuff in. Some would become my friends for life. (but so many would fall away. Rain and Peter included. Life is like that sometimes.)

The group had no name, but we joked, sometimes, about being weasles, ripping each other’s flesh. Like the Frank Zappa Album cover above.

And the day came after a year or two when I would write a story that Whit didn’t hate.

He looked confused, at that meeting, flipping back and forth in the manuscript, trying to say, what it was he usually said, but he couldn’t. Because I’d made him care. He would call me, later in the week, at home, with a new series of complaints about the story, why it was deeply flawed, but it was too late. I’d sent it out.

The story was called Dollhouse, and it was my first professional sale, sold to Charlie Ryan at Aboriginal Science Fiction. In 1994.

Like Rain, I’d sold a story. I had my sign! I knew what was I doing.

Or so I thought at the time. For a while.

Until Clarion.


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Part 2: How Not to be a Writer (unless you have to)

Vogon Poetry is one of the many pitfalls plaguing new smallish writing workshops.
My first writing group met maybe a half dozen times, and reviewed less than twenty pieces in all. We were a hopelessly mismatched group. I was a traditional science fiction fan, more or less, with some strange experiences under my belt, a veteran of the psychedelic seventies. Ron, the big-bearded man, had a similar backstory, but he was subtly different. For one thing, Ron was on the internet, which I’d only read about in magazines. He’d upgraded his Mac 128 to a Mac Plus and wired it to a 300 baud Volksmodem. I marveled at the four tiny multicolored wires teased out of the phone cable, screwed into little posts on the modem, next to the mottled beige Mac all-in-one information appliance. Ron had met his wife on IRC, the web’s first chat protocol. He’d proposed to her the first time they’d met in person. Ron was living in the future. He was, and is, one of the few true intellectuals I’ve known in my life. Marty, Ron’s wife, was sort of in and out of the group, and probably wrote the best prose; she wrote from experience. Steve Burke was an object lesson to me on not judging people based on regional accents. He was from South Boston and had that accent; that Boston accent. Parking the car in the Harvard Yard. He’d lived through the busing crisis; he’d suffered for decades at Fenway Park with the Red Sox. He wrote contemporary fiction, fragments of a novel, in which the curse of the Red Sox manifested itself as crows which dogged his protagonist through a series of calamities.  He was smart, and funny, and soulful, and I regret having lost track of him over the years. And then… there was, oh, let’s call her Rose. Rose the Poet. Who wrote, well, poetry. Here’s the thing about Rose, though, and maybe it’s all you really need to know about her, (but I’ll say more) Rose wrote poetry but never read any. Reading Rose was akin to listening to a man who’d never heard music bang on his guitar with a rock. And this, to me, is the essence of almost any workshop, you bring together a group of people ostensibly trying to do the same thing, and you discover gradually that you are all so weirdly impossibly different that it’s amazing you can even speak to one another. You try to create some kind of shared language, shared understanding, of what writing is, what prose is, what story is, and mostly, you fail. But it’s fun, somehow, trying. More than fun–it’s illuminating. We met a few times, over a few months, never finding a venue we found comfortable. Quickly, Ron and I dubbed Rose the Vogon Poet, and it became harder and harder to go to the group. Ron wrote two science fiction short stories, both of which I remember vividly to this day, and decided that his calling was elsewhere. He didn’t really read or write SF; he mined it for idea, he sucked out its marrow and used it to help him construct reality. Ron’s reality is complicated. Maybe everyone’s is. We dissolved the group officially, in order to get rid of Rose, and though we met a few times afterwards, in a new, reformed, Poet-less group, we’d cut the heart out of the thing when we did that somehow shameful thing. I can’t remember what I wrote with these people–my terrible novella? I remember their work, though. I remember a line from one of Rose’s poems. “Today, I am a bandage.” I remember Steve’s crows. I remember Ron’s VLAI (Very Large Artificial Intelligence, my first brush with the Singularity.) I remember Marty’s bee-drowsed meadow. I remember losing a kind of shame I had, shame and fear, at pretending to be a writer, at playing at it. I remember a subtle shift in personality, in identity, as I struggled with figuring out what the hell I was going to say about someone else’s story. I would never be the same, afterwards.
If you found this essay inspirational, interesting, amusing, whatever, join my mailing list. I mean, if you want to. I can’t make you. But I’m asking. Because you read this, and that means I sorta love you. Um. Okay, this got awkward. Boundaries! This is the link to my mail chimp page.

Part 1: How Not to be a Writer. (Unless You Have To.)

iraglass-sawyerhollensheadOnce Upon a Time, I was going to Be a Writer. Sorry about the capitalization, but there was no avoiding it.

Of course, at first you don’t really want to be a writer as much as you want to be someone who has written. Better yet, someone who has published, really cool stuff, that you and a few million others really really like; love even.

You want to be so good you change people’s lives.

You want to give back to the Universe that feeling, those feelings, all that life you absorbed, acquired, imbibed, by reading. It’s only fitting, it’s only fair, that someone for whom books have been so important should write them.

So you write, for a few years, and you suck, and you can tell you suck. (See Above.)

Not to mention the fact that if you are as weak, as close to clinical depression, as undisciplined, as lazy, as I am, you talk about writing for years before doing it. (To be fair, I was waiting for word processing to be invented.)

When I finally started, I thought, if I wrote, and rewrote, and rewrote, my first story, long enough, it would be Publishable. Whatever that means. And so I wrote on it for a year, and finally sent it off to Analog, because, well I’d heard of Analog, and read a few issues. Or had I read Asimov’s? Anyway, I knew that Analog had once been Astounding, and Astounding had been great, and well, maybe I was great, too.

I printed the drafts out dot matrix on perforated fanfold paper every few days and marked up the copy with a red magic marker, an extrusion of wretched prose which grew longer and longer, but very slowly. Like a tumor.

Oh, that story. A novel’s worth of ideas, many of them stupid, in a novella length story-like thing. My first story combined elements of Eric Frank Russel’s Sinister Barrier with a Zelazny-like Men as God’s milieu, but set in the modern era; reality was a game played by a cabal of reincarnating immortals. The ending came to me in a dream–in a goddamn dream, a vision, and as I wrote it, I knew, I had tapped into something big, something incredible.

I’d be like Heinlein selling Lifeline to John W. Campbell. Oh, maybe I’d need to revise it. John Campbell sent back letters to aspiring writers longer than the stories themselves, i’d read, for Asimov and Heinlein and Clarke. OK, Campbell was dead, but whoever was editing Analog would probably write me a nice long note.

I remember that envelope, the weight of the manilla, the dot matrix address label, as I slid it into the pivoting maw of the blue Postal Box, and a sense of unease, or disquiet, as it fell away into blackness and suddenly, I couldn’t edit the damn thing anymore. The story was done.

I awaited my ascension.

I’ve lost that story, but I’m pretty sure it sucked donkey dick. An any rate, it was rejected with a half page form in six weeks, and I didn’t write another word for another year. Completely derailed by a completely ordinary foreseeable thing. I had no community. No support group. No friends who were writing. No class I was taking. I didn’t even read any books on how to write. I’d read 1000 novels, I should be able to write one. Jeeze.

Kids! Don’t be like me! They should bring me into writing workshops to give ‘scared straight’  rants to aspiring writers, like the convicts they use to frighten delinquents. It isn’t 1930 anymore, and I wasn’t Robert Heinlein, or JK Rowling or Neil Gaiman, and neither are you, and if you want to do this there are going to some goddamn bumps along the way. (See above.)

But during that year of mourning my Heinleinlessness, I met a friend, in a long-vanished basement used bookstore in Harvard Square, a great friend, a burly, hairy young man with thick glasses and a shy smile and a penetrating gaze. We talked for awhile, and it was like they say, you don’t make friends, you recognize them, and it turned out he wrote, too, and he had a group, and did I want to go? He gave me his phone number, because at that time, we didn’t have email addresses.

I was living  with my girlfriend, friendless in a strange city, in shock at finally leaving my miserable home town, temping and trying to figure out who I was and what the hell I was going to do with my life. Yeah. I wanted to go.

This was twenty five years ago, I still want to go, and I’m going, again. I haven’t yet grown out of the Workshop Thing. I gave them up, for a time, and as it turns out, when I give up on workshops. I stop writing fiction. But I digress.

I took the red line to Charlestown, to a basement cafe, and found my bearded friend Ron, an ordinary looking guy named Steve, and a petite young woman named Carol–who was, as it turned out, a poet. Sort of.

My writing life began that day, everything beforehand was a prelude. I had now created a feedback loop that didn’t require John W. Campbell to write me letters on how to fix my stories, because, John W. Campbell was, and remains,  very dead. I wasn’t dead. I was in my late twenties, the author of a single terrible novella, but I’d found the goddamned workshop, a few writers, somehow, this was going to work.

And it did. Sort of. Stay tuned.