I frequently attended science-fiction conventions 20 years ago, when this essay was published. I met a lot of authors, and it seemed many of them had read "Furor Scribendi," and identified with it. They'd gone through the same stage. Alas, I neglected to ask how they'd gotten through it. I'm still dealing with some of the same issues now, and I have never been as prolific as I was back in the day. (Of course, I do have this newspaper career now, and that does take some time out of my writing schedule.)
The unfortunately named Thrust (you were supposed to think of planetary bodies and G's, not sweating bodies and triple X's) was one of a handful of ambitious amateur or semiprofessional magazines devoted to SF, part of a culture that developed in step with professional SF publishing, flourished, and is now virtually extinct.
Richard Geis's Science Fiction Review (better known as SFR), Outworlds, Knights, Thrust and Algol all ran columns, essays and articles by the field's most important authors (in addition to shmoes like me.) These pieces not only gave you insight into the writers and the field, but in a real sense they kept the field more honest by exposing its flaws and its flawed personalities. This sort of rough journalism is now virtually extinct as well, and science fiction is the poorer for it.
— mjm
©
copyright
2001
Mark
J. McGarry
Some of us, way back when, had dreams of money. Others dreamt of our names in lights (or rich, dark print, as it were), and little else. My own dreams were a little more complex. (A trend that continues to this day, because I still think my attitudes towards writing — both my own, and others' — are too complex to satisfy Darwin's demands. But later.)
Naive as it may seem, I first began to write with an eye for publication in order to finance grandiose plans I had for a literary magazine. From the start, it had been editing, not writing, that had the appeal. I fell prey to the mystique that surrounded John Campbell at the time, and that peaked soon after his death ... about the time I became aware that I could string words together into cohesive, and perhaps publishable sentences.
Once I began writing in earnest, of course, its own appeals suckered me in, and I soon became aware that it was writing I truly loved, and that now the editing, when it came, would be the second career. It was easy to slip from one discipline to the other. And, when I began attending conventions, and corresponding with authors and editors, my old interest in editing and publishing gave me insights into what, as a professional writer, I could expect to experience, and enjoy.
Or so I thought.
As an unpublished writer, I still had some access to what went on between editors and other writers. I was like a dishwasher in the kitchen, sneaking glimpses of the party that was professionalism, going on in the Olympian ballroom right on the other side of that kitchen door. I wanted to be a good writer, yes, but I also wanted to taste what had been almost within my grasp for so long. I wanted to talk to those figures, examine those contracts, negotiate for those clauses, attend the banquets, meet in conferences, plan strategies, and all the rest of it. So I watched, from the kitchen, and waited.
And then somebody handed me my going-out clothes and told me to get the hell out on the floor.
§
In October of 1978, Dave Hartwell — then at Berkley — signed for the second novel I had written, The Chaser's Domains. I had written one about a year before, Span, and submitted it to him. At that time he'd not wanted it, but had suggestions for revision. A few weeks after the contracts for Chaser's were signed, I sent him chapters and a synopsis for a radical revision of the earlier novel. He liked it, and by December I was into Berkley Books for a novel I had not yet written.
I was confident. Swaggering, even. I was barely 20 and had two contracts, signed, sealed, and notarized. I had a few grand in my pocket, a new apartment on the sea, a new motorcycle. . . in short, a new life, or the fulfillment of one previously dreamt of. Though the revision of Span bore no more than a passing resemblance to the original — was, in effect, a totally new work — I knew it would not take me more than six months to finish it. I didn't feel like working on the book just then, I felt like enjoying the fruits of my as-yet-unearned gains. I asked for, and received, a delivery date of November 1979. I would start work on the book in June.
I frittered most of the first half of 1979 away. I had just moved; the disequilibrium at first energized me — I finished up a novelette that had been languishing for months, and wrote a short story and a second novelette which I considered to be among the best I'd written. I sold a novelette to Analog, but that didn't take much effort aside from licking stamps, and then cashing the check when it came. I looked around for something else to do, and thought maybe I could do another novel, or maybe....
What I did was decide what to do for six weeks. It was a long time to be idle, considering that I was just beginning to see that in completed wordage, I hadn't done so much last year. I had sold two novels and three short stories, but I had only written a shade less than 30,000 words — the equivalent of half a novel, or five short stories. Half of that had been done in the last two months of the year. By comparison, I had done slightly less than 100,000 words in 1977, and 140,000 in 1976.
This is about the time I began to wonder.
Seriously.
Was success ruining the kid? World I be a two — no, a 1-1/2 novel wonder? Would Don D'Ammassa, in 1987, rhetorically ask, "Whatever happened to him, this promising author of' 1-1/2 interesting but sadly forgotten novels, way back when?"
It was a real fear. Logically, one would think I could have assumed that, having written, I would write; having sold, I would continue to sell. But it was not a logical fear.
I wasn't used to selling what I wrote. I'd been selling sporadically, and to good markets, for two or three years, but it was still new and foreign to me. I was going into projects with more concerns not less. Before I'd worried about finishing a story, and selling it. Now, in addition to that, I was worried about to whom I would sell it, for what, and If the check would come before the collision insurance payment was due; I was worried about reversion of rights, royalty breakpoints, what the reviewers would think, what the jacket copy would say. I had always been overly concerned with the process of writing: where I got my ideas, my style, my subject matter and themes. With everything put together I was turning into a literary brontosaurus, with so many thoughts and worries that I was barely able to swallow my cud without consulting subsidiary brains.