The child is grown, the dream is gone...
I have become comfortably numb...
I'm dropping out of the science fiction field. I won't be going to MisCon next year, or any other Cons, until I've finally sold something to a goddamn fucking science fiction publisher which isn't an "anti-credit" (like my work at Midnight Zoo & Aberations). I've had it with science fiction! I've wasted over 30 years of my life, trapped in a teenage wasteland, spending thousands of dollars on an education, typewriters, ribbons, computers, printers, ink, paper, & countless hours laboring over my stories.
Yesterday's rejection by Analog destroyed my hopes, my dreams, shattered my thoughts, my feelings, left me angry & bitter. He fucking sent back the thing with a comment. I goddamn fucking rewrote the thing with his suggestions in mind.
It bounced. Not with a form letter, true, it was a personal slip, but who the hell cares? All I've gotten out of them for the lasst 20 years is a lot of "almost but not quite"s -- & fuck that shit, when am I going to get one that says, "Yes, this is exactly what we're looking for"?
I tarry no longer with SF. It is the labors of Sisyphus. I will finish Noc-Lar, but only because, with my schizophrenia, it's hard to be organized, so I start things, but never finish them. But that will be the end of it, at least for awhile. I'll do the minimum amount necessary to stay in Critters; I'll finish Brad's novel, but in 5K rather than 10K chunks.
I won't ever complete any of my other novels, though, until I've completed Mindstorm. This novel is the one project that ever held any hope of commercial success. While still a student at the U of M, overwhelmed by depression, no friends except Dave Szabo & my brother Dave (who has since turned psychotic & ran off to the middle of nowhere to escape the "government wiretaps"), a malevolent Dean, Ron Burnell, had me expelled thoroughly on allegations by Mary Lisa Pryne that I'd acted "maliciously" in threatening suicide, whereas her own behavior triggered it: taking me out on a date, shivering my timbers & blowing my woody, in order to take advantage of me to let her read the answers to our take home final -- slut! -- so in the midst of all this fear & loathing, Earl Ganz proclaimed me "the Greatest" (at heart I am Muslim; at heart, I am an American artist, & I have no guilt!), for my then untitled romance a clef, I never promised you a cuckoo's nest; one flew over the rose garden, calling it "extremely commercial, possibly a best seller".
Scott Meredith ultimately ruined the project, left if unsalable to both the mainstream & the SF/F venues. I simply sent him a note, boasting of my prowess, the things that had been said about me, the proclamations of my genius, the prophesy of greatness:
--I think science fiction is in the same state as Elizabethan drama at the turn of the 17th Century -- all it needs is its one great figure, its Shakespeare, to pull it all together -- & you know, I think this could be it. If you can keep this up -- Will Veeder.
--Extremely commercial, possibly a best seller -- Earl Ganz.
After the first, before the 2nd:
--You're writing against formula -- John G. Cawelti (which explains why the utter failure with my attempts at writing science ficton. OK, he did say that Noc-Lar is commercial, but we'll see how the Critters chop it to pieces, without leaving real options in its wake.)
I submitted the then-current version of Mindstorm; he bounced it with a note saying, "This lacks the science fiction elements we were looking for, & the writing distanced me from the narrative."
I reacted by trying to turn the novel into a genre story. I added "Harry Canyon" style flying cars, 3D television, & visi-phones: cliche, cliche, cliche. It wouldn't sell to the SF publishers; being removed from the version Ganz saw, it no longer holds appeal to the mainstream -- my next step is to rewrite it, bringing it more into focus as a mental patient hallucinating, rather than a bunch of quasi-futuristic bull-crap about VADIS. As I recall, I once found a pre-Multi-Death version in my file case. I intend to scan it into my machine, & copy-&-paste in bits & pieces of The Mind-Warp Era, a hot book; no home should be without one. The Mind-Warp which is my Mind-Warp.
Yet I even despair of selling VADIS: after years writing & rewriting the Multi-Death model, it no longer resembles the original. Scanning & recombining both (if I can find the earlier, that is) may yet produce something salable, something that might attract an agent.
In any case, I despair of ever selling anything, or, as Biggie said when I tried to con the Skinny Dog into drawing the pics for a cosmicomic, "Euww! Slime-thing!" (But the real truth is that the woman has no artistic talent -- the same way she danced in Japan & could've "stayed there as a national treasure.")
I guess, if the story sells at Baen's Universe (which it won't) or Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, then I might continue to write science fiction. Or fantasy. But at this point, I'm seriously thinking of just giving up.
I'm dropping out of the science fiction field. I won't be going to MisCon next year, or any other Cons, until I've finally sold something to a goddamn fucking science fiction publisher which isn't an "anti-credit" (like my work at Midnight Zoo & Aberations). I've had it with science fiction! I've wasted over 30 years of my life, trapped in a teenage wasteland, spending thousands of dollars on an education, typewriters, ribbons, computers, printers, ink, paper, & countless hours laboring over my stories.
Yesterday's rejection by Analog destroyed my hopes, my dreams, shattered my thoughts, my feelings, left me angry & bitter. He fucking sent back the thing with a comment. I goddamn fucking rewrote the thing with his suggestions in mind.
It bounced. Not with a form letter, true, it was a personal slip, but who the hell cares? All I've gotten out of them for the lasst 20 years is a lot of "almost but not quite"s -- & fuck that shit, when am I going to get one that says, "Yes, this is exactly what we're looking for"?
I tarry no longer with SF. It is the labors of Sisyphus. I will finish Noc-Lar, but only because, with my schizophrenia, it's hard to be organized, so I start things, but never finish them. But that will be the end of it, at least for awhile. I'll do the minimum amount necessary to stay in Critters; I'll finish Brad's novel, but in 5K rather than 10K chunks.
I won't ever complete any of my other novels, though, until I've completed Mindstorm. This novel is the one project that ever held any hope of commercial success. While still a student at the U of M, overwhelmed by depression, no friends except Dave Szabo & my brother Dave (who has since turned psychotic & ran off to the middle of nowhere to escape the "government wiretaps"), a malevolent Dean, Ron Burnell, had me expelled thoroughly on allegations by Mary Lisa Pryne that I'd acted "maliciously" in threatening suicide, whereas her own behavior triggered it: taking me out on a date, shivering my timbers & blowing my woody, in order to take advantage of me to let her read the answers to our take home final -- slut! -- so in the midst of all this fear & loathing, Earl Ganz proclaimed me "the Greatest" (at heart I am Muslim; at heart, I am an American artist, & I have no guilt!), for my then untitled romance a clef, I never promised you a cuckoo's nest; one flew over the rose garden, calling it "extremely commercial, possibly a best seller".
Scott Meredith ultimately ruined the project, left if unsalable to both the mainstream & the SF/F venues. I simply sent him a note, boasting of my prowess, the things that had been said about me, the proclamations of my genius, the prophesy of greatness:
--I think science fiction is in the same state as Elizabethan drama at the turn of the 17th Century -- all it needs is its one great figure, its Shakespeare, to pull it all together -- & you know, I think this could be it. If you can keep this up -- Will Veeder.
--Extremely commercial, possibly a best seller -- Earl Ganz.
After the first, before the 2nd:
--You're writing against formula -- John G. Cawelti (which explains why the utter failure with my attempts at writing science ficton. OK, he did say that Noc-Lar is commercial, but we'll see how the Critters chop it to pieces, without leaving real options in its wake.)
I submitted the then-current version of Mindstorm; he bounced it with a note saying, "This lacks the science fiction elements we were looking for, & the writing distanced me from the narrative."
I reacted by trying to turn the novel into a genre story. I added "Harry Canyon" style flying cars, 3D television, & visi-phones: cliche, cliche, cliche. It wouldn't sell to the SF publishers; being removed from the version Ganz saw, it no longer holds appeal to the mainstream -- my next step is to rewrite it, bringing it more into focus as a mental patient hallucinating, rather than a bunch of quasi-futuristic bull-crap about VADIS. As I recall, I once found a pre-Multi-Death version in my file case. I intend to scan it into my machine, & copy-&-paste in bits & pieces of The Mind-Warp Era, a hot book; no home should be without one. The Mind-Warp which is my Mind-Warp.
Yet I even despair of selling VADIS: after years writing & rewriting the Multi-Death model, it no longer resembles the original. Scanning & recombining both (if I can find the earlier, that is) may yet produce something salable, something that might attract an agent.
In any case, I despair of ever selling anything, or, as Biggie said when I tried to con the Skinny Dog into drawing the pics for a cosmicomic, "Euww! Slime-thing!" (But the real truth is that the woman has no artistic talent -- the same way she danced in Japan & could've "stayed there as a national treasure.")
I guess, if the story sells at Baen's Universe (which it won't) or Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, then I might continue to write science fiction. Or fantasy. But at this point, I'm seriously thinking of just giving up.
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