1987

Today's entry is the one-thousand-nine-hundred-eighty-seventh post on this blog, so as I did two days ago, I'm going to flash back to what was going on in my writing life in the year 1987.

I attended my third Sycamore Hill conference that year, but I had not sold a story since May of 1982.  I really shouldn't have been allowed in the door, but as one of the organizers, it was a perq of the job.  I was learning at the conference, and I made many friends, though almost none who will come up to me at a con today and say hi, but I was also freezing up and not writing much.  That said, "Burning Up," the story I wrote for that year's event, ultimately sold (after I rewrote it, of course) and appeared in When the Music's Over, a Greenpeace benefit anthology that Lew Shiner edited. 

On the article writing front, Bill Catchings and I had definitely ramped up our freelance business, because 43 bylines of ours appeared in computer magazines that year. 

I was also consulting, a business that led me to Toronto three times in 1987.  The last time, I moved to Toronto the Sunday after Thanksgiving and lived there for three straight weeks.  The job was tense, and the hours were horrific, but I loved the city and became close, at least while I was there, with some of my co-workers.  I still love Toronto and look forward to returning there on October 31 for World Fantasy Con. 

I also traveled to the U.K. for the first time that year for the Conspiracy '87 WorldCon in Brighton.  I quite loved England, and I still do.  I also gained a phrase there that taught me a lot, a phrase I still use frequently:  imaginative concentration.  Geoff Ryman used it in a speech about writing, and it resonated immediately with me.  When as a writer you maintain high imaginative concentration, you are in the fictional world, really seeing and feeling and tasting and smelling it, so that telling details are readily available; you just report what you experience.  When your imaginative concentration flags, you start reaching for descriptions, relying on cliches, and so on. 

Finally, by 1987 I no longer harbored any hope that I would set afire the world of fiction.  Instead, I hung onto fiction like a man tied to a boat in a storm, terrified that the only fate worse than being beaten to death by the boat was drowning as I watched it recede in the distance. 

1985

This entry is the one-thousand-nine-hundred-eighty-fifth post on this blog.  Recently, the entry numbers have looked more and more like years to me as they have marched closer to the present.  For no more reason than that, every now and then I'm going to use the occasion of one of these posts to mention a few writing-related events in my life that occurred in the corresponding year.

In 1985,

• With John Kessel and Greg Frost, held the first Sycamore Hill Writers' Conference at my house.  For good and for bad, it and the ensuing SycHills were hugely formative experiences in my writing.
• First started becoming friends with Dave and Jo Drake and thus began a friendship that has lasted to this day and that has taught me a lot about both writing and the writing business. Earlier tonight, we and others celebrated Dave's birthday at a small dinner.
• Turned 30, a development that took me out of young-gun territory and that also hit me hard with my first huge failure; I had vowed to retire by the time I was thirty.
• Watched as my first professional short story sale, "My Sister, My Self," which was published the previous year, failed to gain any award attention whatsoever.  I had thought I'd set the writing world on fire, but it didn't really notice me.  I've had to relearn that lesson every year since then. That story, by the way, was the first Jon Moore tale. 
• Went to Europe for the first time, an experience that, predictably, changed me forever and that provided writing fodder I'm still using. 
• Published my first computer-related article, "Three-Part Harmony," in the November 26 issue of PC Week.  My co-author on that article was Bill Catchings, with whom I've co-written roughly a thousand assignments with many more total headlines.  Bill remains my business partner to this day.
• First visited Australia and New Zealand, another trip that permanently altered me.

A great many other important events occurred in my life that year, of course, but just looking at this list makes me see now, for the first time, how big this one was in my writing career--and in my life.

A completely meaningless sample

A long time ago, when popular music was mostly awful and good music was mostly punk--yes, the eighties--John Kessel and I ran a writer's workshop we called the Sycamore Hill Writers' Conference. During the years when I was attending SycHill (which is still running; I'm no longer invited), we often took informal surveys of the writers on topics of huge import, such as handedness. I offer three of these for your amusement:

* Left-handedness was more common than in the population at large--or at least, so I remember. (I'm right-handed.)

* The overwhelming majority of the writers were either first-born children or first-born male children. (I'm a first-born.)

* The overwhelming majority of the writers did not attend their high-school prom. (I did not.)

Like most such anecdotal data, I find this material suspect, but at the same time, I've always liked knowing it, so I thought I'd pass it along.