The aging writer hunches over her pen and paper in a cramped and cluttered room. The hour has grown late, daylight long since fled. The wicks of candles gutter as a cold draft of wind blows through the crevices of eternity. The writer shivers, pulls her tattered shawl closer around her thin shoulders. She has […]

As a young geek, I excelled at school and struggled in only one thing, really:  making friends.  Oh, I had one or two, and the occasional furtive acquaintance who was a little embarrassed to be seen with me. It’s a struggle that most adolescents face at one time or another.  Thankfully, I had books.  I […]

I began my writing career, as have many writers, with short fiction. After I’d made my first few professional sales, I came across a new set of markets I’d never considered before: foreign language (meaning non-English) magazines and anthologies. I stumbled across a mention in Locus of a German publisher who was considering stories for […]

Soon the tribe of misfits, dreamers, and outcasts will gather in Chicago for the 50th Annual Nebula Awards. Think about that for a moment – Fifty Fucking Years!  Lord-a-mercy, could Damon Knight have ever foreseen such an event when he passed the hat to create the Science Fiction Writers of America? Since that time SFWA […]

Once upon a time, in an elementary school far, far away, I read a banned book. My teacher was the one who gave it to me, hoping that introducing me to genre fiction would spark something in me. When I was in fourth grade, I was functionally illiterate. When I was forced to read, I […]

At the Milford Writers’ Conference in September, 1966 Damon Knight cornered me in his kitchen and said, “I want you to run for President of SFWA when my term is up next year.” I was startled by that.  I was 31 years old, and though I had already been an active s-f writer for more […]