Writing Fiction

Harlan Ellison: Listen to the Master!

The American SF writer Harlan Ellison has been around since two ice ages ago, and he is far past being a polite elder statesman. Via YouTube, the best advice you will ever get: Pay the Writer.

I confess I've been taken for a ride more than once. Twenty years ago, a poised American film producer, making movies on the cheap in Vancouver, invited me to write a pitch for a kids' TV series. Dazed by her charm, and without an agent to slap my face, I did so.

"I'm sorry," she eventually told me over the phone. "It just doesn't have that magic."

Don't get me going on all the "education" periodicals that expect their educator-writers to contribute for nothing, while their editors, layout artists, photographers, and clerks get paid the going rate.

And don't you ever, ever give your stuff away just for "exposure." You may have the hottest body in the northern hemisphere, but that doesn't mean you have to walk naked down Main Street just to get a date.

Brian Aldiss on the present mess

Via the Guardian Unlimited, one of the great SF writers comments on Our science fiction fate. Excerpt:

Science fiction writers find difficulty in dealing with the global threat, never mind recycling. There has always been a journalistic flavour to science fiction. If an SF catastrophe happens, it happens right now, and LA goes promptly up in smoke. If aliens from Alpha Centauri invade us five centuries from today - well, that's philosophy, isn't it? They will come to teach us to behave or maybe to wipe us out entirely. To serve us right.

We have been so self-indulgent, so foolish, we of the self-promoting homo sapiens species.We have multiplied beyond our means, just as SF always said. No one took much notice. Except, that is, for Gaia. As James Lovelock has said, Gaia stands for Earth with its rocks, seas and atmosphere, together with all living things: Mother Earth. And mothers won't stand for too much abuse. Mothers can get nasty.

I was a boy when I first read Aldiss, and I have always admired him (even when he panned the favourite of my novels, Eyas).

One of the creepy aspects of writing SF is that sometimes you live to see its predictions come true.

Farewell, Norman Mailer

Via the New York Times: Norman Mailer, Outspoken Novelist, Dies at 84.

I can't think of a writer of the current generation as influential with other writers, and with the culture, as Mailer was with ours. We had to read him, whatever the hell he chose to write about—even the sorrows of postwar American Trotskyites in Barbary Shore. In the 1960s he was the American Zola, condemning the US involvement in Vietnam in awesome books like The Steps of the Pentagon, and not-so-awesome books like Why Are We in Vietnam?

He could also create many a scandal, whether by insolently accurate assessments of his fellow-writers or by stabbing his wife.

At some point, however, he lost his touch if not his energy, and I found his books far less interesting than his early work. Still, it was good to know he was still out there, thinking and writing. Thank you, sir.

What a rejection slip!

I've had a lot of them over the years, but the one that arrived late last week was probably the most spectacular. It came from a major Canadian publisher and it ran like this:

Re: Deserters

Dear Crawford Killian,

We're writing with regard to a sample of writing your submitted to XX in February of 2003. As X is no longer with the company, we are writing to apologize on her behalf and our for not contacting you until now. We are sometimes so swamped with submissions that things can get off track. This kind of delay is unusual, and we're distressed it happened in this case.

After all this time we wish we had better news, but after now considering the sample of your novel, we feel that it is not quite right for our list. Our list is quite full, and we have to make some difficult decisions, only offering to publish when we feel the sense of confidence that we can publish successfully.

Thanks very much for thinking of [publisher's name], and sincere apologies again for the terrible delay.

I'm resigned to the misspelling of my name; it's the curse of us German Kilians to be saddled with that Irish double-ell. And it was nice of her to write at all, almost five years after my submission.

But it is discouraging that she could then come up with nothing but the routine boilerplate text: "not quite right...difficult decisions..."

I realize that Canadian publishers are scrambling to stay alive—especially now that the Canadian dollar is worth more than the US greenback, and bookbuyers are refusing to buy at high Canadian prices. To "publish successfully" means to clear a 2% profit on the list price of a book. It doesn't happen often.

Still, it would be consoling to think that publishers actually regard writers as partners to be respected, not as pests to be brushed off.