THE WRITING CONTINUES, PART 1

Organizing this campaign takes a lot of my time and brainspace, so I have had to cut back a bit on what my life is really all about: the writing. To use the obvious example: I had gotten about 63,000 words into my next novel when I signed on for this. That has ground to a halt. (It’s not necessarily a bad thing, though: I had been on a tear over the previous month, going from 26,000 words, and perhaps I needed a break. When this is over, I’ll be able to get back to the novel afresh, sprinting down the home stretch towards my 80,000 word target.)

Nonetheless, the writing goes on outside this campaign. For one thing, there is the Insatiable Maw that is my Web site, Les Pages aux Folles (http://www.lespagesauxfolles), which must be fed every week. (I’ll have more to say about that next week.)

Then, there is the business of being a writer. Last week, I submitted a short story called The Stupefying Snailman, Gastropod of Justice Versus The Disease That Steals the Soul to a new British speculative fiction magazine called The Singularity. The story is a parody of superhero comics, of course, and I hope readers will find it hilarious, but it has a serious theme: the main character has Alzheimer’s Disease. My grandfather died of Alzheimer’s, and, as I get older, I have to wonder if my own memory lapses are just a symptom of passing time or early signs that I, too, have the disease. This story gave me the opportunity to explore how the disease affects people.

The story was accepted in less than an hour, the contract signed a couple of minutes later. I have never had an acceptance happen that quickly; I didn’t think it was physically possible given the physics of this universe. The story will appear in the second issue of The Singularity, roughly three months from now.

Sometimes, a good guy wins one. :-)

PS: Major props to Liz Hurst, the publisher at Pop Seagull Press (https://popseagullpublishing.wordpress.com/), for ordering a couple copies of Both Sides. NOW! yesterday. Check them out; they have published some killer spec fic anthologies (and, I’m not just saying that just because I have stories in them :-). You may not have heard of Pop Seagull, but give them a couple of years and they’ll be making some big noise, so you owe it to yourself to be one of the first people on your street to support them. Who doesn't love being able to say, "I knew them before they were big?"

So. me. What would you like to know?

I decided to devote my life to writing humour when I was eight years old; it’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do, and I’ve pursued it ever since. I remember the first things I wrote: parodies of the Sherlock Holmes stories that I was reading at the time. I wrote them out in longhand on the backs of my father’s legal-sized accounting sheets (the fronts had too many crisscrossing lines); three stories, one per page. And, I remember thinking, “How do writers come up with enough material to write whole long stories?”

At this point, I’ve written 30 books of prose, all told, so I guess I must have figured it out.

It’s strange, when you think of it, for an eight year-old to devote his life to comedy. Stranger still that he manages to actually do it (after all, how many people are actually lucky enough to make the careers they dream about when they’re children?). And, yet…

There’s a wonderful TV series called The Green Room. It’s just a half dozen stand-up comics sitting around in a room talking craft, but for humour junkies like myself it’s pure gold. On one episode, Eddie Izzard was one of the guests. He spoke of an encounter he had with his idol, Richard Pryor. After a little small talk, he found that the two men had something in common: they both wanted to be stand-up comedians when they were four years old.

When I heard that, my response was: “I thought I was precocious when I decided to devote my life to comedy when I was eight, but I was actually already half a lifetime behind the curve!”

PS: Great thanks to Shawn Hancock for preordering a book yesterday, and especially for his sage advice. You’re a smart cookie, Shawn.