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. 

Lewis Shiner's next book

Lew Shiner is a friend of mine. We don't see each other often, probably not more than once or twice in the last few years, but we've been friends since we met at a Sycamore Hill Writers' Conference in 1985. So, what I'm about to say may be biased.

Subterranean Press is bringing out Lew's new novel, Black & White. If you know Lew's work, you also probably already know that you need to order this one ASAP. (I ordered a Limited edition the moment I heard the news.) If you don't know his fiction, you can check some out at his site or his fiction site--and then order the book. Lew's work always contains beautiful prose, heart, and soul.

Give the good folks at Subterranean a little business, help Black & White be a hit there, and hope a mainstream publisher will then find a way to give both it and Lew the broader audience they deserve.