Psychedelia Gothique

Writing is Easy Unless you’ve studied engineering, you probably couldn’t build a ten story building, and no one would give you the resources to let you try. Unless you’re an experienced coder who knows something about user interfaces, you’re unlikely to unilaterally create a new computer app that anyone would want to (or could) use. You might come up with a great idea, but by the time you gain the skills necessary to turn it into something useful and readily available, someone else will have done it first, and probably better. Hard skills – from driving big trucks to brain surgery – are not easy to fake. So when you’re unemployed or unhappy in your job and you’re looking for some sort of outlet for your energies, you may start tallying up your skills and think, “Oh this skill isn’t current” or “I haven’t done that since college.”   But writing? Now there’s something we can all do! Hundreds of thousands of us write on a daily basis, we are all taught how to write in grade ...

While I was working on my novel, I came to a passage that reminded me of a breathtaking description of this very thing – in my story “Roots of the Soul,” which was the inspiration and the source of the ideas and characters in  Avenging Glory . I rooted around and found my contributors copy of  North of Infinity  – the 1998 anthology where the story first appeared. Re-reading it, 20 years later, I was dismayed that the passage I remembered so fondly, was really quite awful. In fact, the whole story was badly written - essentially a bunch of neat ideas, blocked out to give it a rudimentary dramatic arc. But the idea was great. In the 90s, I also turned it into a screenplay and pitched it as  Dark Woods , to a very nice and open-minded producer at BravoFact. She took the time to critique it – and gave me the opportunity to repitch it, a conversation that went very well, but ended with her telling me that she couldn’t see it going any further until I found a direc...

The Arcade Fire song, We Used to Wait, got me thinking about how electronic submission has changed the way we live our lives from day to day. The sweet anticipation has gone missing! When I first started submitting stories for publication in the 80s, there was a fun element of suspense to the proceedings, once I got four or five stories in circulation. Everything was done by mail. The top publications, like  Asimov’s, Alfred Hitchcock’s, Ellery Queen’s  and  F&SF  maintained turnaround times of a few weeks with a maximum of around six weeks. Everything quickly settled into a rhythm, where I was averaging about one response per week. With 10 or 12 stories circulating at any given time, very few weeks went by without getting some sort of response in the mail. Slower publications – usually high end literary magazines and small press magazines, could take as long as six months. Very few publications had longer return times than that, and my stories usually sold bef...

So, when I was 25, I remember looking around to find writers who experienced great success before the age of 30. I was hopeful. Ambitious. And ultimately, disappointed. Oh there were lots of writers who came out of the gate like being shot out of a cannon. I just wasn’t one of them. A few weeks back, I googled “writers who publish their first novel after the age of 60”. Came up with a couple hits, including an article from The Atlantic about great literary late bloomers. Not just good, but great. So it has been done and done well. Time flies, hope springs eternal and WTF??? Over 60 and still haven’t published a novel? My 25 year self would be so ashamed. In fact, he’s standing behind me right now and whacking me with something wet and sticky that smells horrible. Or maybe I’ve just filled my adult diaper again. These things are so confusing. Where was I? Oh yeah. Reminiscing about my path to glory. My younger self was such a cheeky little prick – thinking that the best way...