Psychedelia Gothique

Are We There Yet? As a young writer, I thought of writing a book as a very cut and dried thing. You type the words “The End” on your manuscript and send it to your agent or publisher and soon your book would appear on shelves with a professional and hopefully attractive cover.   If you were lucky, it would come out in hardcover and become available in libraries. I never factored in the editing, proofreading and all the other things that go into publishing a novel. I remember being astonished when Dean Wesley Smith told me at an SF convention that the “pipeline” from submitting your manuscript to seeing it published direct to paperback was about two years from the time it was sold to a publisher. If you were starting from scratch, the path would be more like two years to find an agent; another year for the agent to sell it; then two more years while it went through the full editing process;   substantive editing, copy editing, proofreading. So five years after typing “The E...

I’ve been writing fiction since Junior High School, took creative writing in university and starting publishing short stories (and a few poems) in the 1980s.  I never tried writing a novel until I was in my forties, and the path was fraught with hazards, the road, littered with unfinished manuscripts. Here we are in 2019, and I am just finishing the fourth draft of my first novel to go beyond first draft. Was it worth all the angst and self-flagellation I’ve put myself through over the years? Am I qualified to make that call before I have actually published it and received reader and market feedback? Can I do it credibly? Hmm. Okay, be that way. I’ll do it anyway. 1)       The best reason to write a novel is because you can’t not write it. You persevere through the obstacles, risk alienating your family (because you need that private time to write), and face 100+ rejections when you try to try to find an agent and a publisher. And then you...

As we were setting up our first ever sculpture show, my partner, Laura, and I, were photographing the pieces. Noticing the absence of one of my oldest sculptures during the photoshoot, Laura asked, "What have you done with The Ponderer ?" "Oh," I said, "He's on the shelf in the guest bedroom downstairs." "You should bring him up for the photos." By the end of the day, he still had not appeared. "I'm sensing that you don't like that sculpture very much?" she said. I agreed. But she didn't let it go. "What don't you like about it?" "It's just I dunno, it's just blocky and dull." Laura nodded agreement. "Sorta grey?" Ponderer - 2015 "More swampy. I thought it was going to be so spectacular when I was working on it and then, when I polished it up, it was just sort of mud coloured." That conversation while setting up for the sho...