I feel compelled to mention this every December, but usually I forget until it’s too late to do anyone any good. (I’d say it’s borderline, this year.) Anyway, if you’d like to buy a signed, personalized copy of one or more of my books for that special someone on your Christmas, Hanukah, Solstice, or New Year gift list…well, have I got a deal for you! The deal is, I’ll sell them to you! No extra charge for the autograph! I’m not like those Hollywood stars who sock you $20 for an autograph. Nope, I sock you $20 for a whole book. (Fine print disclaimer: most books are actually some price other than $20.)
Check it out at http://www.starrigger.net/order.htm. Just click on the Price List for the, you know, price list. I take checks, Paypal, and credit cards (via Paypal).
And…just in time not to arrive for Christmas, the paperback edition of Sunborn is due to be published December 29! But if you observe the Twelve Days of Christmas, you could still get a copy in time for that all-important 12th day. (You’ll have to buy from a bookstore, though. I doubt I’ll have copies in time to fill orders that soon.) If you like, you can look at the cover, read the blurbs, and even preorder on Amazon:
And if ebooks are more your style, check out my selection, with links to a variety of outlets, including options for multiformat, DRM-free editions.
Or at least, those of you in the U.S., where we just celebrated a day of remembering things we’re grateful for. For me, it was an atypical one, as my wife is in Puerto Rico with her parents, and my older daughter was at her boyfriend’s house. Younger daughter and I enjoyed the afternoon at the home of good friends, with lots of terrific food.
The last month has simply flown by. Teaching at MIT, and simultaneously running the Ultimate SF workshop, has been both time-consuming and thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding. All the students have been great to work with, and have been bringing some real talent to their writing projects. I’ll be surprised if I don’t see at least a few of their names in print in the next few years. Meanwhile, I’ve had a bunch of family issues going on, which has taken a lot of my energy and is one reason why I haven’t posted in a month. Another is that I’ve been experiencing serial computer failure. First my laptop: a nasty virus infestation, then a wonky hard drive, and finally the whole machine kacked. Only a couple of days after that, my office computer blew its video card. (That, at least, was fixable.) A few days after that, my PDA fritzed out. It felt almost like a concerted attack. Anyway, I’ve got a new laptop, a black Dell Inspiron named Cygnus-X for the black holes Cyg X-1 and Cyg X-3 (maybe). I know some people who have had bad experiences with Dell, so wish me luck. It seems like a good machine. What really sold me on it is the keyboard—vastly better for touch typing than any of the others I tried out. Anyway, so far I really like it.
So…back to getting some real writing done soon? Here’s hoping! I got some cheery encouragement in the form of actual royalties for my ebooks that went on sale last Spring. That market truly seems to be picking up.
Yes, indeed. I was driving to the store in the rain—and it didn’t really even feel that cold out—when I noticed that some of those raindrops were falling too slowly, and splatting too big on the windshield. By the time it was over, we had a steady fall of inch-and-a-half wide snowflakes. (Two to three centimeters, for you metric folk.)
Just a little joke the warming globe is playing on us, I guess. Or not. (This is not disproof of global climate change, by the way. One of the predictions of the warming of the Earth is that climate patterns may behave in unexpected ways.) For all I know, snow in New England in mid-October is well within the range of our crazy weather, anyway. But it sure felt weird. I was just pondering taking the air conditioners out of the windows, not an hour before.
Our Ultimate SF Workshop began tonight (okay, last night at this point), and it looks like we have a great group of aspiring writers, including people from a variety of walks of life. We almost cancelled the workshop last week because we only had three confirmed students. Today we had eleven confirmed, and one more possible late-joiner. Full house! Lots of good workshopping ahead of us.
“People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. —Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” —Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
Today the paperwork rolled for me to become Visiting Wizard at MIT, and I met for the first time with Joe Haldeman’s SF Writing class. (Actually, my title will be “temporary lecturer.” But Visiting Wizard is so much more motivating, don’t you think?) The class went well, considering that I jumped in midstream, and was trying to fill Joe’s shoes without too much sense of disruption. The students pitched right in and participated, and I found them to be a bright, interesting, and likable bunch. Good insights, and a lot of enthusiasm. I enjoyed meeting them all and look forward to reading their work. I was helped immeasurably by the volunteer assistance of Antony Donovan, a former student who is now Joe’s longtime friend and helper.
Meanwhile, Joe remains in intensive care in a hospital in Cincinnati, with his wife Gay right there surrounded by friends who are helping her in every way possible. He’s been under sedation (unconscious, mostly) and on a ventilator for over a week now, following emergency surgery for twisted bowel and a severely inflamed pancreas. It seems to be the latter that’s keeping him in stable critical condition with a steady fever. I don’t know anyone in the SF field who doesn’t love Joe and Gay, so we’re all just waiting and hoping. He’s got a lot of people sending thoughts and prayers his way.
In recent months life has thrown a fair number of curveballs, including some pretty nasty ones, to people close to me. I haven’t written about it, mostly because it’s personal to those folk (although I might mention that my wife loses her job this week—funding gone—so that one’s close to home). The latest is that my friend and colleague Joe Haldeman—whose work I’m sure you know—great writer, great guy—was taken seriously ill last weekend. He’s in the hospital in intensive care right now. (Prognosis good, I’m happy to say.) One spin on this particular curve ball is that Joe’s SF writing class at MIT was left temporarily without a teacher. I got a call. And yes, I’ll be filling in for Joe for however long it takes him to get back on his feet.
So, for at least some weeks, I’m going to be, sort of…part of the MIT faculty. There’s a sobering thought. Doesn’t MIT, like, run the world or something?
Ironically, I was just gearing up for the beginning of my own Ultimate SF Writing Workshop, which I co-lead with Craig Shaw Gardner. So it looks like I’ll be working with student writers on Sunday nights (Ultimate SF) and Tuesday nights (MIT). I think it’s going to be a busy next few months.
If you’re in the Boston area and are looking for an intensive SF/F writing workshop, check us out! Registration is now open.
Here, I thought I’d gotten myself set up for a nice roll of posts, one for each book—how hard could that be. Ah well, the best-laid plans. That schedule, like summer, has slipped away from me. I’m still going to do it, but for right now, here’s a catch-up.
This last week saw us buying a new car (!), thanks to the latest breakdown of our old, much loved, Aerostar van coinciding with the U.S. government’s Cash for Clunkers program. We took the plunge on the last day of the program, sneaking in just under the wire after driving all over the greater Boston area looking for the car we wanted. It’s a Ford Fusion, and it looks just like this stock photo:
We love our new car. It’s comfortable and drives great and gets good mileage for a nonhybrid, and it’s like a spaceship cockpit on the inside. Voice-activated control over my Zune, for heaven’s sake! Thanks to the Sync feature, I can press a button on the steering wheel and say, “Play artist Dido,” and it’ll play Dido. Or “Play playlist Roadtunes,” and it’ll do that. It’s just so damn cool. (I’m also extremely grateful to those who helped make it possible for us to buy it, I should add.) By sheerest coincidence, we picked it up on my birthday. I ain’t saying how old I am, but it was a milestone birthday, and let’s leave it at that.
That very night, I heard the sad news that Senator Ted Kennedy had died. This breaks my heart. He was, I believe, one of the finest senators who ever served in the U.S. Congress. A wealthy man by birth, he devoted himself tirelessly to the cause of the poor, the disadvantaged, the underserved—and he did it right up to the end. Yes, he had personal failings, there’s no denying that. But I will be forever grateful for his public service, and his willingness to reach across the aisle even as he stuck to his guns as a died-in-the-wool liberal Democrat. I just pray that someone will step up who can fill those shoes.
Tomorrow the new car, code-named Centauri, takes its first big run. Yes, summer is over and it’s time to take Alexandra back to college. Road trip!
I’ve posted here about the new editions of my earlier novels, but I haven’t talked much about the books themselves, how they came about, and what they meant to me when I wrote them. Well, where better to do that than here on Pushing a Snake Up a Hill, which by the way is a pretty good summary of how my writing career has often felt.
Let me start with my first book, Seas of Ernathe. It’s not just my first novel, but my first novel of the Star Rigger universe, a future history that I’ve enjoyed writing in, and that seems popular with readers. It’s not the first story in the Star Rigger chronology, though. In fact, it’s the last! It’s set in a time long after the skills of starship rigging were lost to humankind. It’s about the rediscovery of the art of rigging.
How did that happen? Do I always do things bassackwards? No, not always. But in this case, I didn’t actually know much about the history at the time I was writing. I can’t say exactly why this particular story popped into my head, but here’s how it happened:
Go back to 1974 or 1975. I was living with some friends in Providence, Rhode Island, just off the edge of the Brown University campus (from which I’d graduated in 1971), working on short stories while waiting tables, teaching scuba diving, and diving for quahogs in Narragansett Bay to make ends meet (barely). I’d sold a couple of stories: the first to Boston’s Fiction Magazine, for a promise of $50 (collected years later), and the second to Galaxy. In both cases, the magazines went bust not long after publishing my stories—not my fault, I swear! In any case, the story published in Galaxy was called “Alien Persuasion,” and was my first expedition into the tricksy Flux of rigger space, where star-pilots navigated through a sensory web in a hyperdimensional realm that was objectively real, but that took a tangible form based on images projected from the rigger’s mind. (Remind me to tell you more about that when I write about Star Rigger’s Way.)
During this time, I’d been submitting short stories to some of the original anthology editors—in particular, Robert Silverberg for New Dimensions and Terry Carr for Universe. Both had responded with encouraging rejections. On one occasion, in 1974 (or possibly 1975), Terry Carr wrote back with another rejection—but with a twist. He asked if I’d like to write a novel. It seemed he had made a deal with a new SF line to sign up new writers and shepherd their books into print. If I could just send him an outline and three sample chapters…
I stood dumbfounded, his letter in my hand—then flew to my Olympia manual typewriter and began pounding out an idea for a novel—a completely new idea, one that had come into my mind just at that moment, when needed. It made use of my star rigger background, indirectly, and also my underwater experience as a scuba diver. The story was set on a watery world called Ernathe. Visitors to that world wanted to know what strange tricks of the mind enabled sea creatures of that realm, the Nale’nid, to focus on reality in ways that enabled them to travel instantaneously, and to manipulate matter in a variety of ways. Could this be connected to the secret of the lost art of star rigging? Perhaps, perhaps…
I wrote the novel in a little less than a year, if memory serves. By the time it was finished, I’d moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was living with a different set of roommates and working the night shift sorting boxes for UPS. Seas of Ernathe was published by Laser Books in the summer of 1976.
I clearly remember the moment I first saw a copy—not, as you might think, an advance copy from the publisher. No, I was walking down Mass. Ave. in Central Square when I encountered Drew Whyte, an SF fan I had gotten to know during the previous year. Drew always had bags of books with him. On this occasion, he had a copy of my new book, which I had not yet laid eyes on. He passed it to me. There it was. My first novel. In print, at last! I had done it! It was real! Huzzah!
Cover art by Kelly Freas
I hated the cover instantly. Noted SF artist Frank Kelly Freas had been hired to do all the covers for the Laser Books series. Apparently he wasn’t given much money or much time, because to say the least, the Laser covers were not the highlight of his otherwise distinguished career. Lord, I didn’t know whether to cheer or weep. I settled on cheering.
Seas of Ernathe stayed in print for a year or so, and then it was gone. But it had set me on an important writing path, starting with making the transition from short stories to novels. The next two books were also star rigger books; more on those later. For now, I’m happy to say that Seas of Ernathe is back in print, from E-reads. You can get it as an ebook from a variety of outlets, including Baen Webscriptions and Fictionwise, both of which offer it in multiple, DRM-free formats, including for the Sony Reader, the Kindle, and the iThing. You can also get it as a trade paperback wherever fine SF trade paperbacks are sold! Here, I’ll make it easy. 🙂
It’s been fascinating to watch the parade of commentary by SF authors on tor.com today, as we communally celebrate the 40th anniversary of our arrival on the Moon. (The servers there were getting pretty maxed out for a while, so loading was slow, but they seem to have it under control now.) My own contribution appeared during the early hours and has scrolled onto the second page by now, but I’m in good company, coming between Joe Haldeman and Charlie Stross. (Here’s a permalink to the Moon Landing Day celebration. More of a directory, though. If you’re reading this on July 20, better to go to the main page.)
At first there was no cool picture to accompany my post, but they’ve now added one, and I’m happy!
Also, whether by coincidence or design, Ereads.com picked today to do a nice writeup on my books. They couldn’t have picked a better day for it!
It’s been forty years since we went to the Moon! Hard to believe, isn’t it? I was mentioning memories of the lunar landing to some people the other day, and they looked at me like, What is this ancient history of which you speak? This is what I spoke of:
That’s Neil Armstrong, taking one small step for a man (which I watched on live TV, with breath sucked in and a pounding heart); and on the right, Buzz Aldrin getting his chance in the lens. And don’t miss this stunning panorama of the Lunar Module and the surrounding area, taken by Armstrong. (It’s too wide to put on this page.)
Check tor.com throughout the day for commentary from various writers (including me!) on their recollections of the historic event. Adding a somber note to the memory is the passing the other day of Walter Cronkite, with whom I watched much of the manned space program in the early years.
The one thing I never dreamed as I watched the lunar landing and exploration was that we’d go to the Moon and then not go back for at least forty years. I have guarded hope for the future.
“And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.” — John Gillespie Magee, Jr
A while back I wrote that I’d been working on a video piece for a theatrical arts festival called Lydia Fair, sponsored by the Greater Boston Vineyard of Cambridge. Now you can see my video on YouTube!
It is what I would call a video narration, or maybe an audio visualization—or maybe one of you can suggest a more elegant name—of the prologue to Sunborn. I recorded the narration and blocked out the basic image storyboard. Then a talented fellow named Adam Guzewicz worked video and sound wizardry on it, animating parts of it from still images (which I gleaned from various NASA websites), and adapting other animation (ditto on the source). I’m lucky, I guess—that I wrote a prologue that actually could be set to astronomical images.
If you’d like to view it in a wide-screen version, go directly to the YouTube page or to my website. (Wide images on this page seem to cause problems for some viewers, so I try to keep them small.)
For best effect, set the viewer to full-screen and high-quality mode, and turn up the sound a bit. Enjoy!
