Assorted Nonsense

Here’s something that I don’t really get, and that I find kind of sad.

I just finished reading a memoir by Larry McMurtry called “Books.”  Although McMurtry is an Academy Award winning screenwriter (Brokeback Mountain, with Diana Ossana), the author of 28 novels, including Terms of Endearment and Lonesome Dove, he is also the owner and operator of a used bookstore, and has been for about thirty years.  “Books” is about this alternative career.

That’s not what I find sad.

What I find sad is McMurtry’s admission that he never wrote a “great” novel.  Here’s what he has to say about his novels:

Most were good, three or four were indifferent to bad, and two or three were really good.  None, to my regret, were great, although my long Western Lonesome Dove was very popular… popularity, of course, is not the same as greatness.

Lonesome Dove is one of my favourite novels.  Maybe McMurtry is right… it’s not great.  It’s awesome!  If my novel were even one thousandth as good as Lonesome Dove I would be ecstatic.

I don’t think that McMurtry is being modest.  He’s been surrounded by books for so long that he has too many to compare his to.  He’s comparing his books to the likes of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.  It’s apples and oranges.  Newton’s is great for one reason, and Lonesome Dove is great for another.

It may be that the quality of your work is inversely proportional to how good you think it is.

I think my novel is coming along quite well.

Oh.

Damn.

The writers at Anticipation impressed me.

They’re all so darned friendly and approachable. A few examples… I met John Scalzi back at Torcon in 2003. Interviewed him briefly and was left with a positive impression of the man. He was there promoting his first book, Old Man’s War, which was just on the verge of being published. So he was an unknown at the time. Since then he’s become something of a phenomenon. He won the John W. Campbell award for best new writer, at least one Hugo, I think he’s on his fourth or fifth novel now, you get the picture.

So I had every reason to believe that Scalzi would have no memory of me at Anticipation, or even if he did, no reason to acknowledge my existence if he happened to set eyes on me.

I ran into him on the Friday night. My friend Fergus hailed him and they exchanged a few words. I extended my hand and began to introduce myself. “Of course I remember you Joe,” he said (this feat of memory may have had something to do with my nametag. Or not…). And we had a pleasant little chat. And I met up with him again later and another pleasant chat ensued.

Why does this matter? He’s not a rock star — outside the science fiction field he’s a mere mortal, like you and me. Okay me, at least. But at one of these cons, a guy like him IS a rock star. Despite this, if you click on the link a paragraph or two back and read his abbreviated bio, you’ll see further indication that this guy has his feet firmly planted on the ground.

Like Scalzi, I met Robert J. Sawyer before his first book was published. And then watched in awe as he completely conquered the field of science fiction over the next twenty years. I worked with Rob at CBC Radio a bit and discovered that despite his success he also has his feet firmly planted on the ground. At the con I asked him how he was finding the experience (he has experienced many). He commented that it takes him a long time to get from one panel to the next as fans are constantly introducing themselves. He doesn’t mind this one bit, of course, but it is a fact of life for him at the con. I told him I was aware of this, and as a result tried to leave him a wide berth despite our acquaintance, feeling he had enough on his plate without having to kibbutz with people like me. “Don’t worry about it, Joe,” he told me. “You’re a friend, it’s different with you.”

I appreciated that, especially because he could easily have written me off at any point following our work together at the CBC. There’s not much I can do for his career anymore. But he hasn’t written me off, because he’s a genuinely decent guy.

I met several writers for the first time at Anticipation, and they were all equally friendly. We were all amongst like-minded people, with a common frame of reference.

In stark contrast I offer up one odd exception. I once met a writer and was introduced to him as somebody from “the media.” I was gathering tape at the time (it was around the time I interviewed Scalzi and several others). We hit it off right away. I really like this guy, I thought. I got some tape of him but never did a proper interview, I’m not sure why. We parted ways, and I thought so well of him that I purchased his first book and read it.

Afterward, I wanted to let him know what I thought of it, offer a few words of encouragement, so I found his web page and dropped him a line.

Never heard back.

Dropped him another line.

Never heard back.

Honestly, I don’t know what the deal was there. I just told my wife that if somebody makes you feel paranoid, the truth is it probably has nothing to do with you or your actions, it’s something on their end. Maybe he didn’t get my missives, or there was something going on in his life, or what have you. I hope it isn’t that I was just a potential means of publicity for this guy, and when that didn’t pan out, I was of no use to him. At the very least he did manage to sell one copy of one of his books to me.

But this is the exception. Except for this blog with its limited (but, ahem, exceptional) readership, I’m not in a position to enhance writers’ careers anymore. I never really was.

And yet the writers remain friendly.

Here’s an interesting phenomenon I’ve encountered lately. People expressing concern because I am nearing completion of my novel “A Time and a Place”. They’re concerned because I’ve obviously invested so much time and energy into this project — the genesis of the novel was more than twenty years ago (though I’ve only been working on it in earnest for about four years).

So my friends and family are concerned that when it is inevitably rejected (brutally, repeatedly), the rejection will CRUSH me.

I’ll be disappointed, sure. But here’s the thing. Several things, actually.

1. I have a day job, a good one, and I’m reasonably good at it, or at least deluded enough to think that I am. I earn my living with it. So there’s a bit of self-esteem happening there.

2. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War was rejected about eight times before St. Martin’s Press picked it up (okay, Analog serialized it first, but still). Donaldson submitted his Covenant series forty or fifty times before it was picked up. Ursula K. Le Guin received crazy (in retrospect) rejection letters for The Left Hand of Darkness (you owe it to yourself to click on that link if you haven’t already… come back though y’all, ya hear?). So even if A Time and a Place is rejected, I will just keep submitting it. The Forever Submission, the process will eventually be called.

3. Internal Values versus External Values. This one’s the most important of all, so pay strict attention. I do not derive my self-worth from what other people think of me or my work. I derive it from ME. You can reject my manuscript, all my hard work, but you are not rejecting ME. Only I can reject me. And I don’t.

4. The pleasure derived from my novel comes from the writing of the novel. Countless hours of pleasure writing it, thinking about it, crafting it, editing it. I will derive some fleeting pleasure from publishing the novel if that ever happens. I will derive some fleeting pleasure from any positive response to the novel. But mostly I’ll be satisfied just to have finished it, and finished it well (which is why it’s taking so long, by the way… that and the fact that I have a life, a family, a job, obligations, responsibilities etc… and I’m just not selfish enough to place myself or my novel first)

Incidentally, because I’m an optimist I thought I would have the novel done by now. In my bio for Worldcon I wrote that it was done, and that I was hard at work on my second novel, Captain’s Away! (the title includes an exclamation mark, in case you thought I was just getting all excited there). Honestly, I probably have about eight more months work to do on A Time and a Place. Sixty to eighty pages left to revise, and that’s how long it will take me, eeking out a bit of time here, a bit of time there (got half an hour in this morning, enough to revise about a paragraph).

A true professional (say, Mike Resnick, famous for his hard-nosed approach to the business) might deride this approach, and certainly were I looking to write full time and make a decent living at it this approach would not work. But that is not my plan. Someday, maybe. For today, I write when I can, while living the life I have as best I can.

Another time, another place, maybe things will be different…

One panel I attended at Worldcon was called something like “The Analog Story”, or “What Makes an Analog Story”, or “How To Get Your Hopes Up Only To Have Them Dashed Much The Same Way That Girl in The Tenth Grade Ripped Your Heart Out Of Your Chest With Her Bare Hands, Then Spit On It, Then Threw It Into A Woodchipper.”

What the heck am I talking about.

I’m talking about a panel moderated by the well known, well regarded Stanley Schmidt, editor of Analog. Mr. Schmidt, along with three or four other panelists (among them London, Ontario based writer Paddy Forde), discussed what they consider to be the kind of stories Analog magazine is looking for.

I must admit it’s been a while since I thumbed through the pages of an Analog, and I kind of had the impression that they were looking for nuts and bolts kind of stories these days, heavy on the hard science fiction. According to Mr. Schmidt, this isn’t quite the case. He prefers character based stories, with plenty of emotion (the kind of story Paddy Forde delivers in spades… he’s had two stories published in Analog, both reader favourites.)

I asked Mr. Schmidt what he thinks of humourous stories. He said he would like to see a lot more of them. This got me thinking. I try to insert a fair bit of humour into my stories. Actually, I don’t try, it just comes naturally (of course, whether anybody actually thinks it’s funny is another story). It just so happens that in the middle of my novel-in-progress (so close to being finished! so close!) there is a standalone story. Kind of a rumination on time travel, laced with (attempts at) gentle humour. I decided to package it up and throw it Mr. Schmidt’s way. It seemed to me that it might be his kind of story.

So there, you see, I got my hopes up. The story (called She That Dwells) is now in the mail, wending its way to Mr. Schmidt. A few weeks from now I’ll get a self-addressed envelope in the mail containing a form letter informing me that BZZZZZZT!!!! I should think about trying again. (Yes I know I should think more positively… it’s just that I’m bracing myself, you see.)

Because if this story is rejected, it means… maybe… the novel will be rejected.

Which actually means nothing, of course. Because one of the other things I learned at Worldcon (or was reminded of, because I already knew it) is how many times some truly fantastic novels have been rejected in the past. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman was rejected eight, nine times before St. Martin’s Press picked it up. This is astonishing to me… such a readable, important, fantastic novel, rejected so many times. Publishers should have been BATTLING one another over it.

So if my story (and subsequently my novel) is rejected, it won’t matter much. Like Haldeman, I’ll just keep plugging away until somebody somewhere buys it.

Shook Haldeman’s hand at the con, by the way. Told him how much I loved his book. What else is there to say? Thanks, he said, and signed it To Joe from Joe (what else was there for him to say? He’d said everything he needed to say in the book).

So wish me luck, because even though it won’t matter if Mr. Schmidt rejects She That Dwells…

… it sure would be nice if he published it.

David Hartwell is the Senior Editor at Tor/Forge Books, and one of the people I very much wanted to meet at WorldCon. He is the editor of many well known, well regarded Tor/Forge authors such as Robert J. Sawyer and Karl Schroeder and a great deal many more. He’s the man responsible for putting Guy Gavriel Kay on the map (to name just one) and I have the perception that he knows a great deal about publishing, writing and editing. I wanted the opportunity to extract as much information out of this man as possible.

Plus he seems like a nice guy.

I didn’t get to meet him one on one, but I did attend a panel which, although called a panel, consisted only of him facing an audience of perhaps twenty-five interested souls. I would call them aspiring writers, but the questions they asked did not indicate that writing or editing was of any particular interest to them. Because those subjects are my chief interest, I don’t really remember any of the questions or answers not related to writing or editing.

That’s what the panel consisted of: people lobbing questions at Hartwell, all of which he answered gamely and at some length. I got two questions in. The first was something along the lines of: “I’m interested in your work as an editor. Specifically, you edit the manuscripts of highly accomplished writers. What do you typically find wrong with such manuscripts, and how do you fix them?”

He said (and I am of course paraphrasing): “That question is just specific enough that I can answer it in something less than half an hour.” (Which got a chuckle.) “Most of the manuscripts that we receive have too many things wrong with them, so they don’t get published. Of the ones that we do publish, the single most common problem of professional writers is setting. The writers don’t spend enough time on setting.”

I found this really interesting. Naturally you might think that professional writers get most things right, maybe they might screw up continuity or make the odd grammatical error, but setting? I’ve spent a lot of time on setting in my (darned near completed) novel, so this response gave me hope, though that doesn’t mean that I’ve necessarily gotten it right.

Hartwell provided this example of a writer getting it right. There’s a sentence in a Heinlein novel (Fergus Heywood later told me which novel, but I forget) that goes like this: The door dilated. That sentence (according to Hartwell, and I agree) packs quite a punch as far as setting goes. Instantly you know you’re in the future (doors don’t typically dilate in this day and age).

Later I got to ask Hartwell another question. That morning, I told him, listening to Neil Gaiman speak, Neil had spoken of his quest to learn how to write a compelling story, one that keeps you engaged. One day events conspired to teach him this. It was after watching a Peter Greenaway movie, I believe, which lacked a compelling plot, yet that nevertheless kept his eyes riveted to the screen. I apologize to Gaiman if I have this wrong. But the point is the plot itself didn’t keep Gaiman engaged, it was other factors in the movie. Gaiman decided all that was necessary to write an effective story was to write a sentence that compelled the reader to move on to the next sentence, which compelled the reader onto the next sentence, and so on.

I related a portion of the above to Hartwell and asked for his opinion on writing a compelling story. He said, more or less, that it was up to each individual writer to find the secret of telling a compelling story for themselves. And it was different for each writer. Some writers use the interesting sentence after interesting sentence method, others painstakingly plot things out, others make it up as they go along, others use a sketchy outline, and so on.

I prefaced this last question with the remark that I had a thousand questions for Hartwell, but I would limit it to one this time.

He replied, “One for now.”

Here’s hoping I get to ask him many more in the not-too-distant future.

I approached Le Palais des Congres in Montreal this past Friday for this year’s World Science Fiction convention “Anticipation” with some trepidation. Would I fit in? Would the panels on science fiction and fantasy and related subjects be interesting? More importantly, would I be able to hold my liquor at the famous all night parties? Or would this be a colossal waste of time and money?

My wife had taken the kids to visit her brother in North Bay, allowing me the weekend to myself. My friend Fergus Heywood had offered to drive and share a hotel room. Both Fergus and I didn’t know quite what to expect. Fergus had never been at a con this big. I had attended Torcon in 2003, but that had been mostly work. Rather than sample the panels and enjoy the parties, I had lugged around a DAT machine and microphones, interviewing authors and fans for CBC Radio. This time my plan was no work, just complete immersion in a science fiction convention.

And immerse myself I did. I’m going to relate the experience in a series of several posts over the next few days (or weeks, probably). I plan to include some of the audio I recorded at my first Worldcon (Torcon) back in 2003.

First I have to say that the experience was everything I hoped it would be. It just got better as the weekend went on. Almost enough to make me want to go to Worldcon in Australia next year (AussieCon4, in Melbourne). Which ain’t gonna happen… I won’t have the time or the dough. And I fear every con I ever go to again will be an attempt to recapture the experience of this con, which will probably be impossible.

I have to thank Fergus, who made it happen by offering to come along and share expenses. Also, he was pleasant, agreeable, a fine conversationalist and an excellent traveling companion, even if he did flaunt his damned iPhone at every possible opportunity.

So let’s see, casting my mind back to Friday. We made it to Montreal, making only one wrong turn on the way to the hotel, which just about shot us back to Toronto, until Fergus’s iPhone saved the day. It’s got one of them newfangled GPS apps that led us practically to our room in the hotel.

Once checked in we made our way to the con, both of us wondering what to expect (although I suppose I shouldn’t presume to know what Fergus was thinking… for all I know he might have been thinking about noodles, which soon revealed itself to be a major preoccupation of his).

It’s probably not a great idea to tackle this report chronologically, because frankly I’m already starting to bore myself, so I’ll just skip around to the various interesting parts. Also (oddly) I appear to be experiencing a memory lapse concerning the events of early Friday evening (probably something to do with subsequent alcohol consumption, sadly). I remember picking up my membership bag, containing the updated program guide and a bunch of touristy material, and being disappointed that it all came in a plastic bag. You would think science fictiony types would embrace a non-plastic future. Besides, at TorCon it had all come in a neat cloth bag that my wife and I still use to cart stuff around in. But this is just me being picky. And boring. Did I not just say chronological attempts to report on the con were a bad thing? (Joe slaps self on head…)

Have to cut this report short as I’m about to run out of steam, both personally and computer-wise. But I’ll continue to jot down bits of the con experience over the next little while, some of which I hope will actually be interesting (in stark contrast to the drivel above).

Til tomorrow…

More sad news… Phyllis Gotlieb has passed away at the age of 83. I feel greatly for Kelly, her husband… Phyllis was the love of his life. They had been married for 60 years this past June 12th.

It was my honour to present Phyllis with an SF Canada Lifetime Achievement Award last year, which I believe she greatly appreciated. Here’s what I said about Phyllis at the time:

“Everyone here knows Phyllis Gotlieb. You know her work; perhaps you’re fortunate enough to know her personally. You might know that she was born Phyllis Fay Bloom right here in Toronto, and that she was educated in Toronto as well. I don’t have to tell you that she’s written many fine novels, poems, short stories, and that her work spans many decades and genres — that it is an outstanding body of work. You already know that.

Did you know that she’s written radio plays too? Of course you did.

Phyllis is a founding member of SF Canada. Indeed, she is one of the founders of contemporary Canadian science fiction. She has been and continues to be a role model and mentor to many of us who consider her a part of our extended family. In her groundbreaking career Phyllis has been an editor, she’s been nominated for a Governor General’s Award, and she’s even had an award named after one of her novels: The
Sunburst Award. And the award we’re presenting today isn’t her first award – her novel A Judgment of Dragons, published by Berkley, won the Canadian Science Fiction Award in 1981.

You are no doubt familiar with the sheer scope of Phyllis’s work: with her elegant prose, the gritty reality of her fictional worlds, and the vibrant, sometimes tragic characters inhabiting those worlds. Such work has made her a towering figure in Canadian literature, a pioneer in Canadian science fiction. But her reputation transcends our borders – her work is respected the world over.

It’s one thing to be accomplished. It’s quite another to be as
accomplished as Phyllis is and remain so darned friendly. As a
recipient of her generosity and warmth — one of many recipients, I know – I am happy to attest not only to Phyllis’s towering achievements as an artist, but also to her enduring humility.

All of which is more than enough reason to present our very own Grande Dame of Science Fiction with this honour here tonight. Phyllis, on behalf of SF Canada, I am thrilled to present you with the first ever SF Canada Lifetime Achievement Award, along with my sincere
congratulations.”

Rest in peace, Phyllis… we will miss you.

Although many of you might have considered my previous post a stupifying bore, and far be it from me to blame you, I actually found it quite interesting. And not for the reason that you might think.

I found it interesting because I had to make a decision in the course of writing it. I came up with a line that made me laugh, and then had to decide whether to use the line. As I was making the decision I was acutely aware of the presence of my mother looking over my shoulder, and of the good opinions of all my clean living, clean thinking friends, all three of them.

No I don’t live with my mother, although I’m sure such an arrangement would be most pleasant and result in a good deal less cooking on my part. But she does on occasion read my blog and I value her good opinion of me.

If you read over the previous post I’m sure you’ll quickly note which line I’m thinking about. Maybe you don’t find it particularly funny, but when I thought of it I chuckled. Wrote it down. And promptly deleted it and replaced it with something infinitely more boring.

And then I erased that and put the line back.

Robertson Davies has said (or it has been said of him) that he couldn’t write worth a damn until his parents passed on. I don’t want my parents to pass on, I’m all for immortality for the both of them, but I’d love to be able to write like Robertson Davies. His writing was tame before the death of his parents (I believe, not having read his entire oevre), and it was only with their passing that he no longer felt their benign yet nevertheless judgmental presence.

So it was that I felt the need to grow up and allow myself to indulge in one fairly inocuous if crude expression for the sake of a minor chuckle.

Robertson Davies, look out!

Not.