I did one more thing in Santa Fe yesterday afternoon, but it’s a secret for the moment — more soon. And then I came back to the casita and actually got some more writing done (go me!), and then George texted and invited me over to hang out, so I said ‘damn the packing’ and headed over.
We ended up talking for four hours, and I suspect would’ve gone longer if I weren’t being something of a grown-up about getting enough sleep before my flight so I wouldn’t be a wreck today. I may have spent a good half hour pouring out my publishing woes and asking his advice, most of which I can sum up as:
a) I have to decide what I want to be when I grow up
(what, George, I can’t just switch from genre to genre to genre every five minutes???)
b) telling me story after story of great writers he knew who never had the careers they wanted, despite oodles of talent and hard work, which wasn’t helpful, exactly, except maybe it was, at least as a matter of perspective. Do the work, put it out there, and the market will do what it will.
He’s probably right. He’s pretty smart.
Every once in a while someone will ask me, incredulously, how I got to be friends with George R.R. Martin, and I’m not sure I’ve ever written it down. So here’s the sequence:
• I grew up an ardent SF/F fan, reading all the books in the library with rocket ships and dragons on the cover, watching original Star Trek in re-runs in the 70s
• I went to college as an English major, planning to be an English professor, but didn’t get into any of the Ph.D. programs I applied to, whoops
• while working as a temp secretary in my early 20s, I found myself writing a lot — I had nice bosses who didn’t mind if I wrote at my desk, as long as I got my work done first, and turned the screen away from patients / clients
• I applied to MFA programs, and didn’t get into any of those either
• I am stubborn, so the next year, I applied again, and this time I got into a few, and I went to Mills College in Oakland (1996-1998)
• Halfway through my time at Mills, I went to Clarion West (workshop for SF/F writers), where I was told I maybe had literary aspirations and shouldn’t be working in commercial SF/F (I was very sad to hear that)
• I went back to finish my MFA, and somewhere around there, I started the magazine Clean Sheets and ran it for two years.
(We’re almost to the George part!)
• After attending a Campbell panel at WorldCon where someone talked about how few slots there were for new pro writers (only 25!), I thought I could do something about that bottleneck. So I got together with some friends and we raised funds and started Strange Horizons Magazine, launching September 2000. Publishing 51 stories / year, we tripled the number of slots for new writers and I think pretty substantially increased diversity in the field as a result. That might be my biggest legacy in the long run.
• One of the people whom I’d talked into being a volunteer fiction editor for Strange Horizons was Daniel Abraham, whom I knew through Susan Lee, whom I think he knew from Clarion? You may know Daniel better as one-half of the writing team S.A. Corey (with Ty Franck), author of the Expanse epic SF series and TV show. (They’re excellent, if you haven’t read them.)
• George, around this same time, was rebooting the Wild Cards series, which had run for quite a while, sort of fizzled out, and then Game of Thrones hit big and publishers were like, “George, what else you got?” And he reminded them about Wild Cards, and they said, “Excellent!”
• George wanted to bring in some new writers, in part because some of the original shared world crew weren’t available anymore (RIP Roger Zelazny — you are missed), and in part to add some fresh juice (and diversity) to the series. He asked Daniel Abraham for suggestions. (I’m not sure how they know each other, but possibly through Ty Franck, who is a Wild Cards writer?)
• Daniel suggested me. George read some of my writing, liked it, invited me to join. He’s been my editor for over a decade now, on 8 Wild Cards books, and somewhere along the line, we became friends. Probably in part because I’m very happy to sit at his feet and listen to his stories of the old days of SF/F.
So that’s the story, and I don’t know if there’s a lesson there for any young writers; it’s not exactly reproducible. There’s a lot of luck involved.
But I suppose I’d say — do what you love, let your passion infuse the work, do volunteer things too (Clean Sheets and Strange Horizons were entirely labors of love; I didn’t get paid a penny for them, and didn’t expect to).
If you do good work and put good energy into the field (and the universe), it’s likely to come back to you in some form.
And one more note re: celebrities — be polite when you meet big names in your field, be friendly, but treat them like normal people, because they get way too much of people slavering after them. A quiet, “I loved your books!” is just fine, but unless they invite more, let it go at that, and let them go back to being normal people. And don’t hand them a business card, or press your manuscript on them. They’ll ask if they want to see it.
Bye, Santa Fe. Hope to be back within a year or so for Alec Nevala-Lee’s Los Alamos book launch! Alec, does the book have a title yet?
More about Wild Cards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Cards
I’m in: Fort Freak, Lowball, (not High Stakes, because that was the cancer year, but my characters are in there, completing the trilogy), Low Chicago, Joker Moon, Three Kings, Deuces Down (the reissue), and the forthcoming Sleeper Straddle and House Rules. Fort Freak is a good starting point for joining the series. Low Chicago is a time travel book set in Chicago and works as a stand-alone. Joker Moon also works as a stand-alone, and features my character on the cover. 🙂
Trivia: “British writer Neil Gaiman met with Martin in 1987 and pitched a Wild Cards story about a character who lives in a world of dreams. Martin declined due to Gaiman’s lack of prior credits at the time. Gaiman went on to publish his story as The Sandman.” (from the Wikipedia page above)
Pictured below: Merry Meet sign (from the saying, ‘merry meet and merry part and merry meet again’), castle mailbox, and late night George defending his plate of Roshani’s beef curry, paripoo, kale salad, and rice from an avaricious cat.
