[music] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are listening to a podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. Earlier in July, I attended the 24th annual ReaderCon, this literary fantasy and science fiction conference near Boston, because I live a life of excitement, and you don't. I'd last gone to ReaderCon like 10 years ago when I was doing some small press publishing that overlapped with that crowd, but I haven't been back in a long time. I have to say, it's a really wonderful event. It's got these great panels, lots of smart conversation, and actually at dinner the first night I was at a table with, well, there were six of us, five of them were writers, and one of them was a schlub from New Jersey. I discovered that out of the six of us, four had read Anthony Polls, A Dance of the Music of Time. I had just about plots over that discovery because it's a quote-unquote literary work and not science fiction or fantasy, and these guys were all such devoted readers and had so much to talk about it was great. If you're looking for smart SF and fantasy writing and meeting intelligent readers, you really ought to look into attending ReaderCon 25 next year. You can find out more about the event at readercon.org. Now, as far as a podcast goes, I made loose plans to record a couple episodes before I set out for the weekend, and the way things broke, I wound up scheduling five conversations over seven hours on Saturday, and it was quite a performance, let me just say that. Rather than make this a gigantic three-hour-long mega show, I decided to split the ReaderCon special up into two parts. This one has the boys, and the next one, two weeks from now, will have the girls. My guest this episode are John Crowley and Scott Edelman. Crowley is the author of Little Big, a fantasy novel that may be one of the finest books of the 20th century. In formerly, it's also the most common denominator among ReaderCon attendees. There's a lot of variety in that crowd, but if you ask each of them, you'll end up finding that almost every one of them has read Little Big, and they've all made their way to Edgewood with smoky, barnable, Crowley's semi- sort of protagonist. Little Big really is a magical book. I think everybody should read it. I'm indebted to Crowley for giving me his time during a weekend when he was on at least a dozen panels, it felt like, and he was giving a reading of new work. It really means a lot to me to get to sit down and talk to someone whose book has blown me away the way Little Big has. And now, the virtual memories ReaderCon conversation with John Crowley. Although this is all labor of love for me, I don't sell any ads or do any money-making stuff. I just figure, hyperbolicly speaking, it's either this, or I end up on the roof of the office building at some point with a rifle. So we figured, you know, it could create about a lot nicer than the whole meltdown. We used to actually joke about that, there used to be a lottery as to which one of us in the office would snap, and now, in our older days, we realize it's going to be one of the younger guys, and all we are concerned with is our escape route. I figured out the drop ceiling pattern where I can actually get out from the- so you don't have this office life like me. No, I never had that. I was actually something I avoided almost entirely, not completely, but I always knew. Do you ever read Joseph Heller's novel, Something Happened? No, and you're the second person in a row to bring that one up in a podcast, I feel completely inferior now. No, that's weird, because it's not a very- I didn't read it at all, but I read a selection from it, and it was published in Esquire magazine back when he was big, and it's all about an office building, an office life, and all this horrible life lived by people and offices, but there's one thing he says, everybody here is afraid of somebody. The president's the president's CEO, the vice president's afraid of sales is afraid of the executive vice president on and down. He's the marketing guy, he's the president's. The only people who aren't afraid of anybody are the guys in the art department. They aren't afraid of anybody. That was me. Whenever I did work in a company like that, it was always in the art department, and I said, "I'm out of here. It doesn't matter to me. You know, fire me. I'll figure something out." It's fine to get somewhere. It's something. Yeah, right. Yeah, there's a conclusion I reached from years of trade magazine journalism that really qualifies one to be a CEO, is the ability to talk on point for at least eight minutes straight without a break. It took years of these interviews with the guys before I realized I'd look at the timer on the recorder. I'm like, "That was at the two-minute mark. We're at the ten-minute mark. He hasn't stopped talking, and he hasn't deviated from this corporate speak point. That must be the quality that seems good enough for me. They flag that guy as a future CEO." One time I got close to it was when I wrote a sales show. I wrote everything. The things I wrote when I was living in New York, I wrote a wine catalog, I wrote a description of wines that I had not drunk, and it was not going to be given to drink. But I wrote a sales show for "Mate and Form" bras that was all about, it was an NSA kind of theme, moon shot, this is the late '60s, NASA, NASA, which NASA, no, no, they didn't know about it, I'd say. It was heavenly bodies and stuff like that, you know, you get it. But I actually want to speak for the president of "Mate and Form" bras to tell you all about bras. How amazing. It's this corporate world, I mean, it's a funny thing being here at ReaderCon and seeing the number of writers who just don't have that experience, which I consider a good thing. But it is a certain aspect of life you're missing out on for the best, because yeah, the day-to-day job thing can be, you know, that Gaddis, William Gaddis was a big guy. I was held him up because he wrote the same kind of crap I wrote. It was long, encyclopedic, massive, you know. No, no, not bad. Oh, okay. So he was doing the advertising business and over-relations of that. He wrote advertising films I did, too. I think a while of Stephen staying as a insurance executive. As a insurance executive. Actually, he claims to make claims, guy, he actually wrote claims and stuff, yeah. I'm not even going to get a joke about what that must look like. So, my guest today on "The Virtual Memory Show" is John Crowley, author of "Little Big," the Egypt cycle, and "Seven or Eight Other Novels," I think that's a pretty good count. So, I thought we focused today on "Little Big," because it's always an impending anniversary for that book and an impending anniversary edition. I reread the book a couple of weeks ago in preparation for this. My wife has been rereading it every year since she was 14 or 15. I guess as a first question, how does it feel to have written something that has that longevity and that devotion by a fan base? Somebody mentioned at "Reader Con" yesterday that that book might be the most common denominator among "Reader Con" attendees and exhibitors, a common book for everybody here. It is remarkable. And I am enormously grateful to people that they have read it and loved it over time. I think that in a way I can understand it's appeal, I mean, it was written to be appealing. It is what, in some sense, is what W.H.O.D. defined as "e-denic," it is about being about people who are capable of and invite the reader to believe that they can also ought to do what they want to do, and that things can always work out, and that love will triumph over power and all kinds of other wonderful and encouraging things. And I wrote it, I can tell now, I don't know that I could have said it at the time, out of a desire to myself live in a world of my own devising where everything was wonderful. And I mean, a world that you devise where everything is wonderful have to have an element of sadness, an element of loss, an element of struggle in them, or they wouldn't be, they wouldn't be believable at all, and they wouldn't have the effect that they have. Every one of Shakespeare's comedies has that element of sadness and loss and danger that has to be gotten through in order to come out successfully. So I guess it's like that too, but I think that's essentially what it is. I was indulging my own sense of delight and fantasy and things working out wonderfully. The first time I read it, and it doesn't hold up as much the second time as this concern that I had, in the first major part of the book, a lot of it takes place in Edgewood in this, this, well, Edenic mystery house, and I assume New York State unless the geography changes into something else, but it's a fantasy novel for that reason. The first time around it seemed very fractured in terms of what happens once life transfers to the city. The second time around it felt much more organic in those terms and the inner play of town and country, I suppose, worked a lot better for me, or at least weren't just sad for me leaving Edgewood and going into the city. What was that tension like personally and how it was reflected in the writing, that idea of moving from city to country and vice versa? Well, it's odd because I was living in the city when I wrote those first 150 or 200 pages about the country and had not ever really lived in circumstances like that since I was a child when I lived in a little town in Vermont, and so the circumstances could be regarded as similar, not never the same, and so, in effect, I was living in non-Edenic circumstances in New York, imagining New York City in the '70s, which is a terrible place in a lot of ways, and imagining this Edenic land far away when I actually then, in the late '70s, moved away and moved to the Berkshires, which was astonishingly close to what I had imagined in the first part of the book, even though I had never visited the Berkshires, went right while writing it. It was quite remarkable how many things I discovered there that were similar to things I had imagined in the book. I mean, these huge houses that were an awful lot like the houses in Edgewood. It was on the grounds of one of these big houses which had been turned into a restaurant. I found a birdbath which was being held up by little gnome-like figures over their heads, and this is an object that I had already created and conceived in writing the first part of the book. It was just amazing. Do you attribute anything beyond coincidence to that? I don't have a mystic. I mean, no. I think that the wonderful thing about the coincidences like that is that they can't be explained, if they could be explained or accounted for, they wouldn't be nearly as interesting to me. It was, I think, six or seven years you took writing it? I think it was actually, I would say it's longer than that. I think I started thinking about it somewhere around 1970. I can't say that I can't tell you, I remember the day I started writing the first page, but I can't remember the date. It was probably somewhere around 1974 or '05, I think. Did that stay the first page of the novel? Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. Yes. In fact, conceiving that first page is what actually allowed me to start writing the book, because I did not know how to begin. I did not know how to begin the book. I, or how to write the book. I had written two novels by then, and actually three or two in a draft. They were written in standard kinds of narrative forms. I just couldn't imagine writing the long novel that I had imagined in the way that those books were written as distributed third person limited or whatever, first person. I just couldn't do it. The labor of doing that just seemed so unenjoyable. I just couldn't face it. I can remember the day in which I thought I was thinking about it. I thought, "Oh, wait a minute. You could do it by starting like an old-fashioned novel on a certain day in June '19, and you don't tell the date, and you don't tell the name of where he's going. They all have little dashes like old Russian novels." I said, "You can do it by telling a story to the reader." I thought, "What?" Of course, not only, I mean, one of the most amazing things about writing to me is that even though you have written red and heard and seen in the movies, thousands of stories, when you sit down to actually write one, you have no idea how to begin. That was the case with that book. Of course, I knew how to write a book like that. I'd read however many. When I finally hit on that as a way of writing, it changed not only that, made that book writing, writing that book possible, and made writing subsequent novels. How did it inform your career and where it were? Absolutely. Ever since then, I have not stinted at taking the reader into my confidence and doing those kinds of things. Not always in every book. Some books, I mean, I have a suite of possible, you know, a big tool chest now that I can draw, but oh yeah, it made it so much more for me. That was the way to keep on writing, page after page after page. How do you feel your writings changed in the 30 years since? As you've matured, how's the prose itself changed or how's the book changed? For one thing, the writing has over the last 20 years has gotten less extravagant. I mean, I can read a little big myself and now and say, "Oh, come on. Don't have that." The second reading I did on the Kindle instead of the print edition, and I was very happy because I could just touch a word and get the definition because, you know, there were a number of arcasms that I had. Not only loaded with arcasms, it's loaded with fancy locutions and references to other books and snatches of poetry sometimes turned around in a joking way. It's elaborate. And in that kind of writing way, and that kind of style, I have gradually worked my way away from, which I think, I mean, in that sense it's a young man's book, even though I was, you know, almost 40 when it was finished. That's young. I'm 42, that's young. Okay, all right. I won't argue with it. I was a young 40. Yeah, I think I've finished my first short story of 42 just now, so that's not good. Oh, wow, congratulations. No, it's not worth it. But still it was something that finished. You mentioned elaborate writing. Who were your, in that Harold Bloom sense, who were your big precursors, who were you sort of writing, you know, in revision of, or who were your big influences, I guess? Well, I don't, I would not have been able to name them if I hadn't hit on that particular style we were just talking about, of storytelling. Then I could name them, because I had actually read a few right around that time, which, uh, because I said, how am I going to do this? And it was reading those that actually I think finally opened that key to me, even though I didn't know that's what I was looking for. And they are, they're Dickens and Stevenson and, and those kinds of writers, Conrad, who I was reading, I had never read before, I mean, not seriously. I managed to get all the way through, get a degree in English from Indiana University without really reading very many books, I'm afraid to say. It was what we did back then that was considered, you know, hip to do dumb. But, yep. And I went to Hampshire College where you could manage to get by without actually taking a test or anything like that before I did it by not reading the books and passing the test. Nicely done. But, um, I read Nostromo and our mutual friend and, uh, kidnapped and, uh, all the, I was looking for the books that would be my precursors, I don't think they existed before. Um, the only, the books that were the precursors that I could identify were almost all, um, either children's books or, um, poetry, more than they were, I mean, they were Alice in Wonderland. And the books, the books for children, the nature books by Thorne Burgess and they were, um, Omar Khayam and, uh, and Keats and, um, the drawings of Arthur Rackham, the fairy art of Arthur Rackham, which is, which was a lot less well-known when I was starting than it is now. Um, and there's a, there's actually an Arthur Rackham illustration in the book described. Um, but those, those were the sources much more than, and Shakespeare. Those were the sources much more than, uh, um, a sort of contemporary, and it's like with Orr. Right. No, no, no, no. No. I was reading those kinds of books at the time and realizing that they were my coevals, rather than my precursors. People like Thomas Pinchon and, uh, V, especially and, uh, Boer has, and, um, 100 years of solitude and, in fact, there was a point at which I tried to describe little big after was finished and I was being talked to by the promotion people trying to figure out how to sell the thing. I said, I said, how would you describe it? And I said, well, it's sort of like 100 years of solitude if it were written by John Cheever. Uh, see, I've got a great one though, Desolation Road by Ian McDonald, which I once described as 100 years of solitude on Mars with little green men, laser beams, time travel, and shape-changing robots. And it works. It's very remarkable. I hope to get them someday when we get up to Belfast next, uh, because that's, that's one of those novels that really, that's what you pattern this on and you put every trope possible from SF, whatever, more power. That's right. No, but that's the thing. I mean, it has none of the, it has, I mean, the great thing about, uh, that kind of Latin American magic realism when it came along, you said, oh, I could do this, but without different stuff. I don't need this. I wouldn't use the same stuff. Yeah. That would be different material to. Right. Yeah. But the idea of writing the kind of paradoxical writing that Boer has did and, and the kind of kind of, uh, plain magic that, uh, that, uh, is in 100 years of solitude and that kind of deadpan way of describing urban, what is an effect on urban fantasy in V was just so appealing to me that, uh, I said, I know, I know what world I'm in. I know who my guys are, even if they may never recognize me. And then other one was John Barth, um, especially, uh, uh, Giles Goat Boy, which everybody kind of thought was really boring, but I thought it was great, even though, I mean, I thought the boringness of it was part of the joke, part of the fun, you know, given his chops and storytelling, you'd have to figure any missteps or deliberate whether they were going on it is another matter, but, uh, right, again, you're talking to a man who published Chip Delaney than his, Oh, yes. Right. Yes. Uh, when you talk about marketing the book, how have, how have genre labels, uh, changed over the, the course of your career, once upon a time, fantasy and SF were the ghetto, uh, the, the back of the bookstore and such? Yeah. I actually became the back of the bookstore when I started writing. It was only the idea of a, of, of fantasy marketplace that published fantasy novels so labeled, only arose, uh, in the middle of the 60s after the huge success of mass marketing of Tolkien. At that point, uh, the, the, uh, Judy Del Rey and the Ballantines and, and those started publishing books like Tolkien, uh, and in, in order to appeal to the same market. And it was when those guys started doing that publishing these three volume fantasy novels, uh, fans of elves and swords and stuff like that, they had all existed before, but they'd all have been a definite niche. I mean, people like Fritz Leiber and, and writers like that had always written this stuff, but a conscious creation of a market for things like that occurred right around the time I was entering, entering the field. And, um, uh, it was, it began to be possible. I mean, the, the one before that, the big one that had a label like that was, um, romance novels, which were marketed all in the same way, they had all the same kind of plots, they all had the same cover with a girl running toward the reader in distress in a long Victorian dress and a tower in the background of one lighted window. Yeah. And there were dozens of these. I can't, it was just amazing to, to think that people would read more and more and more and more of them, even though they were entirely identical, which the fantasy novels also became though they didn't begin that way because it had, it had not, it had not, was not yet the kind of market that the romance market was. It has become since then now. Once you figure out how to make it a woman, and once you chop it up and, and, and, uh, publishers like my original publisher, Lou Aronika, at, at, then at Bantam was one of the creators of, uh, this kind of niche market. He, he would have high fantasy and he would have, uh, steampunk and he would have this and that and they were all, they're own little trademark and they're own little slot. Oh, an imprint. An imprint, uh, Bantam spectra, which was the sort of speculative line and, uh, Bantam, whatever, which was the fantasy line. Um, Bantam books bought little big at that, at that, at that early point and, um, did not want to treat it that way. The original idea was to make it into a big modernist important novel in the, uh, one hundred years of solitude, the kind of, the sort of, sort of grouping and, uh, and also appeal to the, to the fantasy, uh, crowd, such as it existed then, and, which was just in the process of defining itself. And, um, the decision was made very, very carefully not, not, not to appeal directly to that fantasy audience, but to the literary and, uh, more hip audience and to the extent that, when it first came out, the original title of the book as it was given to me, and which actually appears on inner pages of the book was, was Little Big or the Fairies Parliament. It was an old-fashioned novel and also having an alternative title in that old-fashioned way. Uh, but Bantam declined, put that, make, put, make that the title. And the reason was, according to the, the editor, the publisher, the editor, who had taken over the book and to publish it, said, "Oh no, if we put Fairies on the title, there's this book going right down the toilet." So it was not, and it would have had this stark black and white cover of no illustration. Uh, it was all done up to be just as, just as unlike mass as possible, and didn't sell very well, actually, in its initial appearance, and, uh, only began to sell, and when, sort of, they changed their, the, the, the book has gone from the front of the bookstore to the back of the bookstore, back to the front of the bookstore. [laughs] He's had many journeys back and forth, and it's very, it's, it's, it's fantasy, though. They were able to- Once it was fantasy, it, it, it, it, it found its audience in a, in a much, much more large scale way. And I do have one, uh, difficult meta question that comes out of a chapter of, of the book because that's my shtick, um, in the daughter of time, uh, Ariel Hawksquill is discussing the, uh, the differences between the ancients and the moderns. Uh, in terms of them seeing things in terms of space, the, the ancient seeing things in terms of space, and the, um, the modern seeing things in terms of time. Yeah, to look at the ancient concept through the spectacles of the new concept is to see absurdity, sees that never were worlds claimed to have fallen to pieces and been created newly, a conjury of unlocatable trees, islands, mountains, and maelstrom. Now, a few episodes ago I interviewed Eva Brand, the, uh, a tutor at St. John's College, uh, long timer there, and, uh, to her, the, the program of the great books is to bridge antiquity and modernity, um, in which she contends have a massive chasm between them. How would you, at least based on that chapter and what you've written over the, the decades, do you see that, that ancient and modern split and do you see that, uh, reconcilable in any way? I mean, it's, it's a little big an attempt at sort of working that out in some respects. And, uh, it, I would not say that it was. The Egypt cycle is very definitely, uh, on a way of working that out. That's the, that is the series that takes on this gap between how the world was conceived in the past, either in antiquity or as, uh, the Renaissance and, and the Baroque era understood antiquity, uh, as opposed to the way it's understood in the supposed modern era, and the joke in that book, rather elaborate joke for volumes long, is that, is to pretend that in fact in the past the world did work according to the physics as proposed by, in the magical world, and then it stopped working that way and now it works in a different way, but it could change again. Um, little big, I don't think did, uh, I didn't conceive it as working that way. I conceived little, I conceived aerial hawksquills being able to draw on those forces, but not that I was not, I didn't feel I was proposing, uh, a gap between, between existences in that kind of a way. Because I wasn't able to draw a good conclusion out of it, I'm glad you're not going to say you idiot, it was right there in front of you. No, no, nothing like that. And in fact, that paragraph specifically came out, uh, my reading of a book by Georgia Lusantihana, which was very popular in, um, among certain kinds of, uh, same kind of people who were interested in, uh, lay lines and stuff like that. I'm out in theater. Yes, right. Uh, the book is called Hamlet's Mill, and it's a book about, uh, how the, um, precession of the equinoxes, which is, you know, an effect of, uh, the zodiac, uh, the, the day of the, uh, equinoxes, actually passing backwards through the zodiac as time goes on. And, uh, the book posits that the precession of the equinoxes could have been perceived by our stone age ancestors, if they, because they looked at the sky all the time. And that, the entire description of the ge-, ancient geography of how the heavens and the earth are, are sorted out are actually an encoded version of this ancient astronomical secret about the precession of the equinoxes, which was a secret kept by the priests of, you know, the ancient stone age times. And then that knowledge was lost, and the precession of the equinoxes wasn't discovered again until the late classical Greeks. And, uh, meanwhile, that great system of rivers, planets, stars, lost and found and fountains and, and salt boxes at the bottom of the sea and all this kind of stuff, which was the allegorical encoding of this fact, these facts about the precession of the equinoxes and the tilt, northern tilt of the celestial, uh, axis, um, all of that, it turned into our system of folklore and myth and all that kind of stuff that can be scattered around the world in fact. But you don't consider yourself a, uh, say believer, uh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I didn't name him a scholar of it. When I read, when I read Hamlet's Mill, I thought, wow, that's incredible. If this didn't happen, and it may well not happen, something this complicated must have happened. Yeah, that was what I got out of it myself. But you know, so basically what she's describing is the world as, it was described in Hamlet's Mill and, and how that, it was a world, it was a world of time translated into space. It was basically what it is. Now, a conversation topic that's come up, well, at both dinners, I was at last night, uh, which I think is a relatively frequent topic here, catalogs of unwritten books. Oh, yes. I came up in the dinner before you and I, uh, uh, met up. Do you think of those in terms of your own body of work? Do you think of others lost works or, or, you know, fantasy books? Not fantasy books that you, you know, have wanted to see from writer X? Well, of course, my books are full of imagined books that have not been, that have not been written. And one of the ways that you, I mean, um, one of the, one of the things I think that writers are tempted to do to say, I have a, what a great idea for a book that would be. Yeah. But I'm, I just can't do that. I'll just make a whole paragraph about it. Yeah. Or I'll assign it to some imaginary writer and give it, be able to give us an office of it. You know, Stanislaw Lamb did this, there's a whole volume. I don't know if you know this of, of reviews of, of imaginary books. I can't remember the title of it. You can find it by that description. They're great. And it's obvious. What he did. I mean, I'm not going to write this. I think of all those characters and all those lines of dialogue and all that. No, no, no. I'll just, you know, give the praise see of it. And that's what I've done. There was one, a, a story that I wrote, it's a short story, it's a longish, short story. But it is a short story, it's called novelty. And it is about a writer getting the idea for a book. And I really thought I was going to write that book. I really believe that I could write that book. And then the end I said, oh, I can't write this book. What am I going to do with this? I said, oh, I get it. Another writer will fail to write it. And I'll write a story about it. Another topic that came up yesterday in our, our meal writing rituals, which we understand are bullshit. But do you have any particular, either just times a day or is there any, any repetitive pattern to how you work? Well, a long time ago, because I hated typing, I was a terrible typist and I, and typing was, I had a big manual typewriter that I, that I use and it was probably kind of rusty and hard to use in the first place. But I just, I was a terrible typist, I typed with two fingers. To me typing was like the torture, torture, it was labor, I hated doing it. And when I, if I got into a page and realized I had to retype it, then it was just the worst. So I wrote almost the entirety of all my books by hand, by, in long hand. And would actually make fair copies, they would, I would draft them and make a big messy draft and then copy it over, so that in the end, I had like an entire, an entire long hand manuscript of it before typing it up, with advent of word processing, of course, this, this becomes OGOs and I don't do that anymore. Did you get any better typing? I got better typing. I even actually learned to sort of touch type in a kind of half-ass way. But I certainly, I mean, the word processing was such a relief to me. But it did, it did cut back on that kind of process. And made it harder to write, at least for quite a while, harder to write on trains and buses and things like that. And now, of course, you can write anywhere. But my process, I always was better at writing in the morning than at any other time of the day. I can't, I'm not, I'm not good after, you know, sunset very much. I haven't ever been able to write anything in the evening or at night. Mom was better in the morning. Once you get, and this is, Hillary Mantell has a wonderful description, you want to have a great, a great description of how it works. She says, she writes in the mornings or whatever, I can't remember what it is, two or three days a week. But when the book starts picking up, and she's starting to get, you know, it's in its full spade, she writes all day long, all night long, never stops thinking about it. All of us is writing, even whether actually on the page or in her head all the time. And that can happen to me too. It just takes off, it just takes off and goes, and you, and you just don't stop. I remember one time being in, in my orca on the vacation, and it's a little apartment by myself, and I suddenly understood how I was going to put together what would become the, the Egypt volumes, which I had not understood how to, how to do, how to come, how this world would be created. And I got it, suddenly, I kind of rushed, and I couldn't sleep. I would, I'd get writing notes to myself, and then I'd go to bed and like lie there, toss and turn for five minutes, then jump up and start writing some more. You get these blessed things, you know, that are very rare in your own writing life. But that bypasses all your little habits and all your little ways of having six sharpened pencils or whatever it is, you know, I've had few of those. So you had to prepare for the lightning bolt. Yes, right. Or yes, right. You have to, well, it's such a, the thing about writing is that it is not a job. I mean, it's not doing anything. I mean, for the most part, at least for me, I mean, there are laborer writers like Conrad and who just sat there at the desk and wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote, wrote throughout a while away. So apparently by the end of the day, he'd be knee deep and like crumpled paper, you know, and make his way to bed. I never did that. And my drafts are really very clean, but I do spend a lot of time thinking, casting sentences in my mind and the openings of paragraphs and stuff like that. And then I sit down and write. So my job is sitting in one place staring out the window and it's really hard because there is nothing to do and it's like, you know, loafing for a living, except it's more anxiety provoking than that, you know. And you have to worry about an audience that's... Yeah, and you have to worry about... Yes, you have to worry about it. You have to worry about selling the thing. And but you also have to worry about achieving something and not just drifting off into, you know, drink and masturbation. And the internet. Yeah, which also, you know, kind of feeds into both of them. Yes, right. Well, I didn't have that, but I know what you did have in the old days was, you know, magazines, if you were a curse, you know, or magazines. Now, you did mention the title being given to you earlier. Did you mean that in terms of sort of transmitted from the ether or from an editor? A little big. No, I was just... All they did was tick, tick off the subtitle of this thing. Yeah, you just mentioned the title as it was given to me. Oh, I don't know. Oh, I see which you mean that's part of the lightning bolt or... It was. Yes, it was. Well, yes. The idea of the, the idea of the name Little Big came to me as just a... Yes, and I love the title. My mother said to me, "No, no, no. You can't call it that because it'll get confused with Little Big Man. Don't think it ever has been, so I'm in no danger." But the idea of the fairy's parliament, of course, comes from the book that, the Persian epic tale that provides me with, provided me finally with a plot, which I hadn't had before. But it was late, late in the book that I discovered that, so... And you were able to write plotlessly, somewhat? Yeah, well, I knew where I was going to some extent, you know, I knew it was gonna be a family chronicle. I knew that it was gonna involve these kinds of characters, but I didn't have a way of pushing them toward an ending until I, until I discovered this book, you know, the parliament of the birds or the conference of the birds, this... And actually, more than the book itself, I was inspired by, bore his description of the book, which is the first thing I heard. Which is better than the book itself. The book in some ways, yes, like a lot of his, I had pre-seize our... Again, why get around to writing this? All of your more recent novels have been non-fantasy, and I don't know how you'd want to break down the split between them. How different is it writing in that sort of realist/naturalist mode than writing something that you know is essentially, you know, this fantasy? Well, actually, you know, I have never thought of myself as writing fantasies as such. Yeah. I mean, the first three novels I wrote were science fiction novels, really, at least the two of them were beasts, and the deep were really coldly calculated science fiction novels using science fiction stuff, and I've written some stories like that, but the big books that I have written have never, to me, had a genre at all. They just had, there were certain kinds of fictional possibilities that intrigued me and interested me, and that I wanted to try to achieve. And I wouldn't say that there's an awful lot in Little Big that is realistic, but it's an awful lot that's based on my daily experiences of life in New York City, and it's very human novel. It just happens to also have this very driven, you know, engine at the center of it. Right, and this thing that surrounds all the characters and causes them to do what they do, even if they don't know it, but the things that they do do, you know, were things that I'm not unfamiliar with, you know, I have lived in a family, I've lived in New York City, I have fallen in love and been disappointed and all that kind of stuff, and so of course you can write that kind of stuff. And in Egypt, too, the things that happen in that story, there's a whole enormous modern layer of that book that is, you know, has to have some connections with my own real lived life. In fact, that book is even easier because it is a realistic novel with the intimations of something unlikely or unnormal, you know, unreal being laid into it. But of course, any lived life in the real world, if it doesn't have those kinds of possibilities or those kinds of working, you know, thing, it wouldn't be the real world because the real world we do and live in does have those kinds of things. So I never thought of them as being, in a sense, constructed according to the rubrics of fantasy. They were just books that I was trying to achieve and the ones that were I tried to write other kinds of books were books that I, ideas from books that I had for years, I mean that I thought that I would finally get around to doing. And I did not make, I didn't make a conscious decision to go away from fantasy and into a kind of more mainstream kind of writing, you know, mainstream is only a word that's used not in the mainstream, I never heard the word mainstream, but the impulse to write those books came more from a desire to, first of all, write books that I thought would be fun to write. I mean, I wanted to write a book about Lord Byron for 20 years before I got around to finally doing it. And the idea of a plant or in the Southland someplace, some kind of, you know, southern desert-y kind of place that was building something in the Second World War, I've also had just vaguely floating around in my consciousness for years. So they weren't like a new departure in that sense. I did consciously want to expand my readership and involve more kinds of people, kinds of readers with the work, and that was very conscious on my part, that I hoped to have it do that. It wasn't terrifically successful. I was going to say, did you feel that it was a success? Not really. I mean, the books were well-received, they were well-reviewed in many instances, and they were respectfully received. They were not... A breakout? No. They were not in terms of readership, they were not a breakout. Did your existing fan base stick with you from us? I'm not sure. It's hard to know. Exactly. I mean, I don't get reports on my entire fan base. When I have suggested that I might drift back toward, you know, what the kinds of books that I know they enjoy. That's received gratefully as news, and somebody said, was very annoyed at me. I can't remember it being in some of my Amazon reviews, which is more the box pop than, you know, the regular reviewing, is there have been people who are very annoyed that I have not written a book like a little big again, but, you know, I have no way to apologize for that. It must be very difficult, though, balancing those audience expectations. It is. It is. And if you step out, I mean, the thing about Alan Steele, I don't know if you know... I had met him at this weekend. He's a classic science fiction writer, space operas, spaceships, the whole thing, and his thesis was that the fantasy science fiction realm is like a mafia family. They'll support you, they'll stand by you, they'll keep you in business, they know you they're there, they'll give you the support. If you fail, they'll pick you up, but you can't leave. You never turn your back on the family. Never turn your back on the family. And doing that can baffle and confuse, and there's no place else out there for you. If you think you can start over again, Alan talks about trying to start again as a mystery novel writer because his space stuff seemed to be coming to an end and his agent told him, and you can understand exactly why, well you would probably have to come up with a new name. That sounds wondering. Is that the next step? You have to start all over because the two just don't comeingle. My fantasy novels never gained me much of a readership outside of it, and my non-fantasy novels or lesser fantasy novels didn't gain me much of a reading within it, now that readers like Cherish are people like you, people like people who have read all of it and found all of it of interest and not had to make distinctions of kind, you know. I've coming into this, I've read six of your books and felt woefully unprepared. Coming in, I was thinking, well I haven't really read Crowley's stuff that I look back. I've read six of his books actually, I've read a certificate now, but there, it speaks of the breadth of your writing. Well, that would be very nice if you felt like you've read a lot of them but you still don't know what they are. I think that's a plus though it's poor for me as a brand name. I've always kind of thought of myself as a little bit like one of those great actors where I never stars, you know, I was looking entirely different in the movie. They've got big noses, they've got hair out to hair, they don't have any hair or they are fat and the one, the thin and the other, some of them as they're good guys and as they're back. They're great actors, they're the backbone of the business, but they'll never be stars because they don't have a recognizable form that they take. I think you don't want to rest on your laurels, but I think Little Big is quite a milestone or quite a large piece of reputation to have. The last question I had going over an old interview of yours, your Robert Crumb fan? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. How far back does that go? It goes back very far and maybe and possibly stops fairly early. I mean, I like them in the back of the '60s when I discovered Robert Crumb writing in the underground papers in the late 1960s. He was such a revelation, it was so amazing and what it was was something that was something that I, as cognate to anyway, the way I tried to use his little Victorian fairies in Little Big and the traditions of fairy land storytelling and Laura Dunsony and all those kinds of guys because he was using the tropes of comic book art and crappy, you know, audiovisual stuff and all kinds of other, you know, pop, drag to make a new kind of art with. I'd never known any, I mean, I knew pop art, but pop art had a kind of solemnity that, you know, it was hanging on a wall, right, whereas Crumb was just elated to be doing this and he mixed it with the crazy psychedelic stuff, at least for a little while, that was very familiar and intensely evocative to me, even though I wouldn't call myself, I've never done anything like what Crumb has done with it. Yeah, you're writing about human relations tends to be a bit more subdued than, you don't have sex the way that the way Crumb represents it. But his sex and his, but especially the connection to the way he develops out of a set of tropes that he modified entirely and remade as his own work, I thought was just sensational. I'd never seen that done before. It was, to me, a really new thing in art. It must have been amazing to see something like that in its birth thing, you know, as a new art form. Oh, yeah. It was one big full page thing in, I think it was, I can't remember which paper it was, one of the underground papers, and it was called Bebop or Rebop, and that was the title of it. That's one, it's a phrase that recurs a lot in Crumb, but it had this whole long story. Every little panel of it would take the story one crazy step more as, you know, people would wake up from dreams and find a mystic mark on their hands, and then the next page it was, you know, Mr. Natural, who wasn't yet, they didn't yet have a name, you know, teaching somebody something. Binky polish your shoes and go on, it was just unbelievable. And then at the bottom, the bottom is just like, little row of these, there's a sunset with those little row of dopey guys, you know, with those huge shoes on, and the line was, it's never really the end except for these guys. On that note, John Crowley, thank you so much for coming on The Virtual Memory Show. My pleasure. And that was John Crowley. Seriously, go read Little Big and his Egypt cycle while you're at it. I think the first book in Egypt plus the first 70 pages or so of the next book are among the most wonderful writing I've ever read. And that's Egypt with an AE at the beginning, not an E. And if you can wait, there's a super special edition of Little Big that's on the way. It was supposed to be out in 2006 for the 25th anniversary, but there've been some delays. I talked with the publisher Ron Drummond about it during ReaderCon and he sent me the following statement about the status of the new edition. "A luxury new edition of Little Big has been in production for a number of years by the Seattle-based Fine Press in Cannabula, which previously published a Lux editions of John Crowley's Antiquities, Seven Stories, and Samuel Artilani's Atlantis, Three Tails. Designed by Ron Drummond and John D. Berry, the new 800-page hardcover Little Big will be printed using archival materials and have more than 300 reproductions from the art of engraver Peter Milton, as well as an original 9,000 word afterward by Harold Bloom. Best of all, the text has been thoroughly edited and corrected in close consultation with John Crowley, including the restoration of brief passages cut from the original manuscript and other authorial improvements. The publication is expected in late 2013 or early 2014. For more information, visit the website of littlebig25.com. And that's the number two-five. And I may have Ron on the show around the time the new edition is out, but I'm not having him on until I actually see a copy of this new little big. I'm not going to get burned. Now, our second guest this episode is Scott Edelman. Scott's an editor at Blaster, which is without an E, unlike Egypt, which is with an AAnony, an online magazine at the sci-fi channel. Scott's also published a ton of short stories and poetry over the years, and he had a pair of collections come out a few years ago. What will come after and what we still talk about. The latter assigns fiction, and the former contains zombie stories, which is right up my alley. Scott's also worked as an editor at Marvel Comics in the 70s, so we sort of worked in some conversation about that. To be honest, I'm actually a little bummed because Scott and I talked the day before our actual sit-down for like an hour and had a wonderful conversation. And of course, so many of the topics that were so fresh on Friday, we didn't really cover on Saturday or sort of approach them a little differently than we did just sitting around in the hallway, but that just teaches me I got to carry my mics with me every where I guess. And now, the virtual memories reader con conversation with Scott Edelman. My guest on the virtual memories show is Scott Edelman, a writer, book reviewer and zombie story writer. I just picked up the most recent collection. I think it's your most recent collection. Scott Edelman will come after. I guess we could start with a zombie question. What got you writing about zombies to begin with, and what's the market for that like? Well, I love zombies and have been into them long before Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and long before the Walking Dead. I've always loved them. I think my first zombie story I wrote probably about 25 years ago, I've always been fascinated by them, and there's a great debate within science fiction horror fantasy fields as to whether zombies are worth writing about. It's pretty funny considering the tremendous popularity they have now, but there'd be these panels of conventions on zombies versus vampires, and oh, you know, vampires are very interesting but zombies are very boring, and how could you make interesting fiction about zombies? So it's very funny to see that after years of those panels, all of a sudden they're far more popular, both in books and on television, but from my perspective, zombies are the closest we will ever see to what we will really become because they will be that day when we are all walking husks without memory, not being sure what we are and who we are and so forth. So I think it's easier to be afraid that we each might become a zombie than it is that we might become vampires, with the eventual decline of our mental faculties, it's waiting for us, and I find them the ripest fictional creature for metaphor to use in fiction. So I've written many, many zombie stories until there were so many of them that Pete Crowther and P.S. Publishing put together that collection called What We'll Come After, which includes a wonderful drawing on the cover by Les Edwards of me as a zombie, a cover that my mother does not like to look at, me with my flesh rotting off and the ear ripped off and so green to, but I love the anthology and love the cover and I'm very glad to have been writing about them for years. What's the market like for you, both zombie fiction and science fiction in general? What's the state of the fiction or short fiction publishing market for you right now? Well as someone who primarily publishes short fiction and who normally only does whatever the heck he wants, I tend not to pay very much attention to markets, which to my detriment of course, I am not someone who generally looks around and says what is so-and-so looking for as opposed to oh I'm going to write something and then hope that maybe there's something out there who might like it, which means that if you were to take the 80 or so short stories that I've published and break them down, a third of them might be horror fiction, a third of them would be science fiction, and another third might be fantasy with some more mainstreamy metafictional stories in there as well. So what that means is if you like the story of mine that you read this year and you like horror only and we're hoping to read my next story, you might say oh now here's a science fiction one up, now here's a this and that and the other, I know there are many people who say pick a thing and stick to it, the branding but yeah I find that very difficult to do and there was an interview I read in locus several years ago and I forget who said this in the interview, it's probably best that I forget who said this in the interview because I don't want to be maligning anyone but I thought it was a sad anecdote and then the author said you know I was speaking to my agent and I'm the kind of writer who likes to just write whatever I like to write, I'll write this kind of thing and that kind of thing and the other kind of thing and my agent told me well that's not a good idea, you should just pick a thing and write that thing because the market wants it, the booksellers model and so forth and I went ahead and did that and now I'm selling books not fairly successful and I said that's sad, it really made me sad to think that this author would have a brilliant idea that would fulfill the person and would say oh I have to set it aside, it's not what people are expecting and of course in terms of books these days what you have happening is people using pseudonyms for different types of pen names for different types of work that they do, they had not to do that in short fiction, that's preferable to abandoning a particular part of your psyche but I much prefer the old days where someone like Frederick Brown could write mysteries, could write science fiction, could write horror and there was less pigeon hauling in the old timey days in the 40s and so forth because it was just oh well you write strange stuff and it's all the same strange stuff and now that we have bifurcated and split even further what the field is with different tastes and people say I will only read stories about left handed vampire hunters in an alternate universe and I don't want to read the other stuff, not everyone is like that, I mean I'm not trying to say that all the answers are like that but certainly when booksellers that has occurred with certain authors who have been forced to do that and that's a long way of saying that I am a jack of all trades master of not very many but trying to do my best, what were you reading growing up, what really inspired you or what do you see as your big literary influences, they varied during time if you go back to my truly younger days we go to what I consider fantasy novels like Dr. Doo Little and so forth and of course comic books were tremendous influence growing up, my earliest memories of reading pre-superhero monster comics and I remember being the old Kirby and did co-stuff and I remember, well and Basil over did and so forth and I remember when the first issue of the Fantastic Four came out, I was born in 1955 and I remember the tremendous difficulty of only having 12 cents for a comic book on the day that both The Avengers #1 and X-Men #1 came out and standing there and looking back and forth and saying oh I can only get one of these, which one did, it ended up being The Avengers, well at the time I said well I know who these guys are, these are all characters I like which is the point but I did end up getting X-Men #1 so they were a tremendous influence, the early short story collections of Ray Bradbury that were put together, but the folks I truly fell in love with I think the people who were the most influential to me as a teenager, the ones that make you sort of want to become a writer at least for me were people like Carl Nelson, Rogers Alazny, Chip Delaney, someone who was very influential to me was Thomas Disch as well, you know people who short stories I just absolutely fell in love with and people who I wanted to do my best to emulate. In SF it seems much more audience participation I guess or at least the audience almost comprises a farm system through fandom and coming up like that and eventually meeting your idols in a way that maybe we don't see in literary fiction or in other art forms, what was it like for you achieving enough success that you're on a panel with Disch or Delaney or someone like that at an event like ReaderCon? It was quite interesting for me to get from one side of the table to another side of the table in that I have attended conventions since I was 15 years old so I've been attending for many many years. My first convention was a comic book convention in 1970 on the 4th of July in the Stadler Hilton Hotel run by a guy named Phil Sewling and that was where I then discovered about science fiction convention so I was at the first Star Trek convention I went to a lunicon in 1972 and my first world science fiction convention was 1974 in Washington D.C. so it's quite amazing to move from one end of the table to the other because I remember quite vividly those early days before I had sold any stories when I was going to my first convention and I would hang outside the Sifwa suite which is science fiction writers of America for folks who don't know and you were only allowed in if you remember and I would stand outside and a couple of others would stand outside and the door would sort of crack open a little bit and you'd say look I think I see Isaac as most elbow that might be John Campbell's foot in there or something like that and it seemed like Valhalla that you would be able to actually speak to folks in that way because when you're a fan you would sit in a panel and listen to people talk and occasionally ask a question and I go up and get a book autographed and maybe you know talk about some other things but the concept that I would be sitting down and having a conversation with people I remember I think it was Denver Worldcon and I was having breakfast with Robert Silverberg and Gardner does Wild Walked Over and sat down and we looked over and said oh look over there he's you know Fred Paul's having breakfast by himself he shouldn't be doing that you know come on over and I'm sitting there thinking oh my god I'm sitting here having breakfast with Gardner who I did not know about as a kid but you know a great editor and a extremely talented writer but Robert Silverberg who I read growing up and oh my god Frederick Paul if you were to tell that to the 12 year old me that someday I would be sitting at science fiction convention would be sitting around chatting is equals I would not believe it would happen so I do I'm still always constantly amazed when things like that happen so I still get tremendous joy from it and it is wonderful to be participatory in that way I was on a panel yesterday about the clarion science fiction writing workshop which I attended and people were talking about what does clarion mean in the myth of clarion and I sort of said well what clarion really was wasn't necessarily clarion what clarion was you get to spend a week with Tom dish you know you get to spend a week without his budgets you get to spend a week with Carol Emstweller and so forth so to me what conventions really represent is a time to be with friends and be with peers and know I get to hang out and chat with all the people I love who are friends well I don't love them all but that's part of but we are just like a family right now you have the you have the crazy uncle's nance and the people you you put up with and so forth but they still love underneath it all but I've been going to conventions since 1970 and they're one of my most favorite places in the world I come back again again and you spent a few years working at Marvel Comics in the 70s as I recall great anecdotes from that era at all or what was a sort of atmosphere there in terms of well being a working environment but also being around people whose work you adored as a child well that goes back to what I was saying about having lunch with those folks the concept that I would go into an office and be a few offices down from Stanley is just mind boggling comic books I don't want to say it's more limiting than the book field but if you say I want to grow up and be a book editor you know there might be people who say I want to grow up and be a book editor a tour but generally it's you know oh okay I want to be a book editor I want to work for a newspaper you might want to work for the New York Times but if you say I'm the go and do comic book through the back then it was pretty much Marvel or DC and how few people did they actually have working there it's not the hundreds and thousands of people working in the field today so the you know the idea that you would end up working for Marvel Comics down the hall from Stanley get to see him every day get to interact with people like that and all people who are also just coming up people seeing people like Jeff Jones and Barry Smith and Bernie Rice and you know the folks who are how we're checking the folks who are coming in it's just an amazing thing to have happen and when it went through fandom the only reason I ended up getting a job was because of my time and comic book fandom because unlike with an entry level position in a publishing company where while you want someone who knows how to proofread knows how to copy edit and we'll train this person and with them in the shape you can't just hire someone who's a proofreader copy editor and say here's the original art for this issue of Spider-Man we want you to proofread it well that person might get the words correctly or things spelled or grammatical but they won't know off the top of their head that when the little footnote says this happened back in Spidey number three if any and you're proofreading and saying that didn't happen in Spider-Man number three that happened in Spider-Man number eighteen so I was someone who knew Marvel Comics inside out because this was I started working there in 1974 so therefore I was unlike now if it would be very difficult to ingest the entire history of Marvel Comics and say I have read everything today did you have ever published so it was easy to say oh I know off the top of my head that Namor is bellbuckle is wrong or that the webbing under Spider-Man's armpit isn't correct and my job was well that wasn't actually my first job I was actually hired to be the assistant editor on the British reprint books and after four or five months I then moved into the regular bullpen where I would sit with the original artwork and a blue pencil and make little notes and take them back to the correction room and have them fixed and it is fascinating to go to the San Diego comic book convention Comic-Con and look at the original art that is for sale from the old days and occasionally find my handwriting in the margins of some of that artwork because it's blue pencil and they don't bother erasing outside the margins and so forth but it's just quite funny to see that that still exists and to think that someone's buying money to hang a page on the wall that might have my little inconsequential noodling on the side but that was the job and to be reading comic books four months before they came out in the original art one and a half times up I guess it was at that point was an amazing treat and there was no sense of this is how the sausage gets made or disillusionment over comics during that spin well that does end up happening but I had a ready face that difficulty from getting a design fiction fandom sure there's an anecdote that they tell when Harlan Ellison met Isaac Asimov for the first time and I can't remember the exact quote but it was something about supposedly Harlan it said something like oh you're not so much or and it wasn't meant in an insulting way it was from having read Isaac Asimov you had this image of this he man is not necessarily from his work but you have this image that you build in your head heroic writers as gods and they are you try to imagine what the person behind the story is but you don't necessarily fill it incorrectly so the sudden and I had the difficulty and fandom when I would then after my first few conventions go back read the work and in my head instead of hearing the omniscient narrator I would hear the voice of the author and I know there are some folks who don't like to do that and it was easier to get over with the fiction than it was with the textured stories novels and so forth and it was with the comic books because you did have the more of a sense of it being a business because you saw decisions of ongoing characters being made in the office and it could have gone as easily a completely different way as people are debating what would happen and it was fun and thrilling in a different way but if you're reading man thing for example and filling in what it sounds like based on your interpretation of the characters or if you're reading man thing and hearing Steve Gerber's voice in your head or any of the people who I met at the time Lenween, Mark Wolfman, all the writers who were there Steve Angelhart and so forth and you're hearing them tell you the story it creates a very different perspective I did after several years completely burn out of comic books you know left comics was worked more on science fiction and on my own fiction and I didn't come back to comics until Watchmen and Dark Knight and so forth came out. Did you stick around or have you kind of drifted away again? I dip in now and then but I basically you know most of the comic reading I do is rereading the old stuff that I read as a kid in digital form and saying wow this is very strange to be reading "Daredevil #1" on an iPad when I was reading it as a little kid in Brooklyn and on an ocean parkway so I still love them I still go to Mocha or an SPX and the small press stuff I'm more interested these days in the non superhero stuff that people are doing but I unfortunately most of the comic books are behind me and I don't have the time to get into them as much as I would like but I do read all the comic book blogs so I tend to know about what's going on in comics rather than actually experiencing them and that's something I have to make up for that. Just the meta perspective is fine it's better than you know the real thing it's better than no perspective certainly. Who do you read nowadays? In terms of the fiction I love reading people like let's see we have Liz Hand and I just came for a wonderful reading by Marie Mckew that was happening here at reader.com and I'm sort of blanking out now that I'm thinking about who I read mostly short stories I do tend to this is very odd I do tend to go back and reread certain stories that are my favorites there are certain people who once a year I will go and pick up a particular story that I love above all others so for someone like Fred Paul I will go back and read Day Million or for someone like Tom Dish I will go back and read the squirrel cage so I end up doing a lot of that and I'm trying to get my own writing done at the same time but mostly what I tend to read are the short stories and I'm trying to experience new writers with whom I'm less familiar and that comes through the magazines and the year is best in the small process and so forth. And coming to something like reader con does that help? Coming to reader con and trying to push yourself by saying I'm not just going to go to the readings of my friends which often we tend to do it ends up coming this is a good thing and feeling part of a family is a good thing but you want to extend the family to other people so several years ago for example I went to reading Alaya Don Johnson for example she's someone I had never read yet and you know I'd seen her at panels and chatted with her and I said okay I have to go discover this person so I do try and do that otherwise you end up just being closeted and clicky so I am trying to experience other folks and is there a sense among younger writers a sort of understanding of the historical significance of some of the people who are here? Do you find it and not reverence reverence but at least an awareness of oh okay well that's Edelman who did this and that's Crowley who did that you know a sense of understanding of the continuum of where they are. People do understand the continuum but I don't want there to be quite that reverence book it's then you sort of on a shelf and I want everyone to be equal it was very wonderful and back when I edited a magazine called Science Fiction Age and I took Jack Williamson out to lunch and I went to lunch with a friend of mine Brian Murphy who was my assistant at the time and never been to a convention before as far as I remember and for him to have lunch with Jack Williamson was just mind boggling and Jack basically when he was called Mr. Williamson and said no I'm just Jack you know don't call me Mr. Williamson we're all the same we're all fans we're all just here to love this thing and really want to be approached as equals. This particular convention does have a reverence for the past and they give the Cordwiner Smith Rediscovery Award here which tries to bring back into memory people who were once extremely influential and have now been forgotten but how Paul told me that's that's what he's aspiring to. Oh to be forgotten just to get out of words someday for being a forgotten author who's well say yes we hope we are that's sort of like the person who says there goes my future ex-husband or future ex-wife or something like that but there is that love and reverence and but also what would the word be. Recontextualizing of older figures as well as we try to understand them you know were they other time were they better than the time were they worse than their time and so forth and there are a lot of small presses bringing out of print people back into print but there are always folks who are forgotten and this is the good convention to go to because here if you raise your hand and say how many people have read you know Cordwiner Smith stories rather than just hearing about them as a name and so forth you get a better show of hands and other places but it's impossible to keep up with the entire field that goes back to what I was saying about comic books if there was a point when you could say oh I've read every Marvel comic that's ever been published or I'm totally up to date with the Silver Age superheroes but you can't say that now and once in science fiction you could do that as well you know if you were there in the 40s you could very easily say I've read all the science fiction published this year because the number of magazines were limited and it's a good thing and a bad thing but ultimately I think it's a good thing while we all can't say yes we can have a conversation because we know we have all read the same stories less so that that is too limited it can't have that commented on there was sort of too limiting it's nice to have more channels on the TV it's nice to have more magazines and it's nice to get more voices out there so I don't know if we've been around about way answered that question with yes and no yeah what a what lessons do you have to teach about story construction? Oh do I what have you learned that I have learned and are able to actually share as opposed to something intuitive that well all the things I know I know from standing on the shoulders of giants that's basically all the best I have to do because I just sort of bumble along and try and tell the best story that I possibly can and one thing I want to say because there's been a lot of discussion about workshops and whether workshops are a good thing and whether you should listen to what other people have to say and do workshops leads to a marginalization or do they teach you what I have to do I'll bring in an anecdote from Tony Bennett of all people okay because Tony Bennett once said what when I was young they called my flaws now they call my style which I always thought was a very important lesson that you know don't necessarily listen to the people who want to polish off all the rough edges that you have because that's your unique voice that's what makes you you that's what people want make you want to read you and when people try to be like other people too much they lose who they are you know your book comes out and it says in the tradition of J.R.R.R. Tolkien or whoever it might happen to be I love J.R.R., I love The Lord of Rings a million times when I was growing up but don't you in the final analysis want them to say in the tradition of Scott Evelbin or in the tradition of who you are that's will make people come back to you some of the things I've learned over the years again and I now forgetting whether this was Howard Waldrop or whether this was Bruce Sterling so we're not going to Google it now but ask what the definition was of a story and what the definition of a novel was the story was this is the most important thing that ever happened in that person's life after which they are no longer the same person they have that epiphany they're changed in some way and novel is the most important period of time in that person's life obviously there are exceptions to all of those things we have series characters we just like to revisit because we like hanging out with them and you know for Sherlock Holmes who was just not not changed does not have epiphanies in his story but for the most part that's something that when writing a story I sort of look at there's that aspect is he deciding when you're writing a story or coming up with a science fictional horror fantasy to see someone once said who hurts that's who the story should be about if you're talking about well I figured out a new way for invisibility to happen or the aliens have landed or you're slowly turning into a zombie you had to figure out who would this really matter to and I had a particular story that I wrote about a zombie that dealt with a woman who was horribly depressed and wanted to commit suicide but realize that she couldn't any longer if she lived in a world where if she would do such a thing she would come back gotcha so it said so therefore basically you take the conceit of people coming back and saying well who would really be perturbed by this at least for me that particular one occurred in that way so that's one of the things that people have to do often people start stories too early and finish them too late meaning they take a couple of pages to ramp up to the story and then they go on long past the final moment that really means something I like to do to leave a little bit for the readers to figure out do you think that's something that gets fixed by workshopping or is that something that a writer just needs to understand on his own I'm just that's well that is certainly something that because I went to the clarion science fiction workshop in 1979 and that was definitely something that wasn't calculated because often there are things that people do when they're starting to write a story that are more like revving the engine and kicking the tires before the story actually starts so you have too many stories beginning with folks getting up we're having a cup of coffee or looking in the mirror smoking a cigarette because that's what people did that morning before they did what they were meant to do and you know if you're lucky you'll hack all that stuff out but for me workshopping was a good thing and that it helped me realize mistakes I might have been able to fix on my own given enough time bumbling along but why should I have to fall and break my nose several times before I realized I shouldn't do such things and with other people are intimidated by workshops simply because of what I was mentioning earlier that some people feel that the rough edges get removed that you are writing to the workshop that it's too important to you that your friends like the story that you just wrote and so forth and you really have to have the strength in the workshop in your head no one to discount what people are saying that oh wait that person just trying to write their story based on my concept and they're not trying to you know they're not trying to actually help me realize what I wanted to say and that's what's one of the big difficulties with workshopping sometimes that folks don't understand how to differentiate between that when they're helping you then you shouldn't say well if I were writing a story about that theme this is what should have happened instead oh this is the point you want people to take from your story if you might say oh it should have a happy ending should have a sad ending and so forth just like you know the famous story of Flowers for Algernon which I don't know wait twelve flowers can't be that famous flowers as well as men to a movie as well and well it's a famous oh let's call it an argument a famous story about Flowers for Algernon no I'm sorry yeah well no the famous story about Flowers for Algernon was when it was written HL Gold wanted it to have a happy ending I didn't like the fact that he returned to the intelligence that he began with I mean this is this is a story about severely mentally handicapped man gets involved in experiment becomes a genius and eventually goes back where he became and how sad that is that he loses the intelligence he once had and Horace Gold said that has to have a happy ending and I believe Phil class William 10 basically told Daniel Keys I will kill you if you if you do that as well people always want to have a happy ending and say no this is the story that I wanted to tell and it's going to be that particular story so you have to learn how to do that and I've had many stories I've taken into work situations where the story was reviled and misunderstood and no one had any idea what it was about I had a particular story which I consider my first major sale for example the one that really was very important to me as okay I've gotten somewhere I wrote a story called are you now question mark which to my mind if there's a story called you know are you now for certain generation people finish that they are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party and therefore the story has to you know dealt a lot with that and people a had no idea that there was anything to do with the Blacklist period thought that it was just are you now yeah and the references I made because I never named McCarthy in the story I call him Taylor going to Joe or the senator whatever and they thought it had to do with the Iran Contra hearings and so forth and people were quite confused they had references to Larry Parks who was the actor in the Jolson story who was blacklisted and they thought the character's name was Larry Parks and anyway so there's a lot of confusion and misunderstanding and someone said I would just throw the thing away it ended up selling to Dennis Edgerson for an anthology called Medahar that came out from Dell books and he was the person for whom the story basically was written because he was a student student of the Blacklist and it was a major sale for me and it was not a story for everyone but I listened to folks and said oh you know people don't understand what the story is about I have to make it clear I have to be very specific I can't use that title book it's obviously everyone is misunderstanding what the title is and I had to have the strength and then this is sort of separate in terms of writing advice it's sort of separate from whether it actually is a good story or not is the concept that one must have to have the strength to say well my friends think I should do it one way but you know what they're wrong it would be as if your friend said to you you know that girlfriend of yours or boyfriend of yours who you really love I think they should have a different color hair and eyes and be a different height and yeah I've gone to a different school and say well I love this person this is the person I love you have to be a boyfriend and so you know so in my mind you know writing has to be the same way that you have to write the things you love they have to be extremely important to you they have to give you the tingle when you reread them and because if you're not moved by that if you're bored by it I can't say how anyone else would be moved by it and for me a story has to be a journey of discovery if I'm not learning something from the story I don't want to write it even though I think that it might make for an interesting story it no longer has anything to teach me I once heard someone say that they can't write a story if they plotted the whole thing meaning what's the point of building the bridge if I can already clearly see everything on the other side so there are different kinds of writers and I'm not saying the same thing is correct for everyone I never want to come down as an absolutist that is on one way to do it all I can do is say what makes me happy and what brings into creation the stories that I want to tell it's very good note on which to end Scott Edelman thank you so much for your time thank you for having me and that was Scott Edelman you can find more about him at Scott Edelman dot com E D E L M A N including info on his recent collections what will come after and what we still talk about as well as his work at Blaster and other venues he keeps up a pretty fun presence on Facebook and Twitter which you ought to check out he does a dream journal that's absolutely nuts but I enjoy it and that was the virtual memories show there'll be a new episode every other Tuesday if I have anything to say about it and the next one will feature the second half of our reader cons special and that one will have guests Theodore Agass, Valle Lupeshku and Nancy Hightower you can subscribe to the virtual memories show on iTunes by searching for virtual memories and clicking through to the show's page if you go there please do me a favor and just post a rating and review of the show on iTunes I really love some feedback from listeners and I'll give you a shout out in the new episode or the next episode if you do the virtual memories shows also available at our website chimera obscura dot com slash VM if you visit the site you can make a donation to the show via PayPal to help offset my web hosting and travel costs and things like that going up to reader con for a weekend and getting two nights of a hotel and everything else does actually run up a bit of cash but and if you do leave a donation you'll also get a shout out on the next show plus I'll send you a copy of this neat short story I wrote or the next one that I write your option we're also on tumblr at virtual memories podcast dot tumblr dot com on Facebook at Facebook dot com virtual memories show and on Twitter at VMS pod until next time I am Gil Roth and you are awesome keep it that way [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
