Writing

Fiction
Non-Fiction
OtherRealms

I’ve written professionally on and off since the early 1980’s, publishing both fiction and non-fiction. My non-fiction credits include both technical items that included stints as Contributing Editor for Macintosh Horizons and NetProfessional magazines and a stint as Book Reviewer of Science Fiction and Fantasy for Amazing Stories when it was owned by TSR.

A few years back, I made a decision to stop writing and focus on computers. I don’t regret that, but over the last year or so, I’ve found I’ve started missing writing again, and so I’ve decided to reboot my writing career in 2009 and see what happens. My first published piece since I decided to start writing again came out in January, 2009 in the Guardian.

I’m still figuring out what “rebooting my writing career” means. I guess we’ll all figure it out together. Getting back to work on one of my novels is definitely in the cards, but beyond that, I’m just starting to explore options and opportunities. I am, of course, open to suggestion.

One of the things working on OtherRealms was that I found I enjoyed as much as writing, perhaps even more, is editing, and I’m exploring those options as well. I have also done the occasional technical review of a book (the most recent being Shelley Power’s Painting the Web for O’Reilly) and I’m open to those opportunities as well if there’s a good technical fit.

Fiction

While I was actively writing fiction, I sold six stories and had five published (the sixth was bought by Pulphouse magazine, which folded before it was published). I was never a prolific fiction writer, and most of what I enjoyed writing wasn’t your standard fare.

In my writing, I really enjoyed exploring the boundaries between SF and Fantasy, and screwing around with that mythical “fourth wall” between the story and the reader. These are tough to do right, easy to do badly, and I’d like to think I more or less succeeded most of the time. I also tended to write off into left field — my first sold work, for the SF anthology Alternate Kennedys, was actually a horror story, not remotely SF. My favorite pieces involved a continuing character I was working with, a computer consultant who kept getting involved with fantastic beings (those are Good Intentions and Birds of a Feather) — that series was an attempt to write a hard-SF series about a subject that quickly becomes boring to many readers (stories about working with computers, as opposed to stories with computers in them as gilt and props) — but at the same time, involving purely fantastic and mythological beings.

In Good Intentions, it’s good. Or maybe the devil. Or, well, someone. In Birds of a Feather, it’s a serious piece of SF about using computers programmed to cast spells for a witch. This series, if I’d continued it, eventually would have been turned into a mosaic novel about the consultant — I had further stories plotted out involving a unicorn, a leprechaun, Elvis (seriously), the Greek Gods of Mount Olympus and Sherlock Holmes. If you want to find another book that, while not really an inspiration for this series is similar in intent, try to find a copy of Mike Resnick’s Stalking the Unicorn : A Fable of Tonight. I have a third, unpublished story in that series involving our intrepid consultant and Santa Claus. I’m looking into making copies of these stories online, once I have a chance to find the contracts and verify what stories I can do that with legally.

The Batman story, the one I wrote in collaboration with Laurie, has it’s own strange story about its creation. We initially submitted an outline for the story to DC that caused mass horror among the editors (it involved the Penguin going back to a high school reunion to get even with all of his peers that made fun of him as a young boy, killing them off in nasty, gruesome and very melodramatic ways — when we had him chop the head off of the teacher-nun with a sharpened metal ruler, the DC people evidently lost it) — but we were given about 24 hours to come up with an alternate story, write and and submit it as an alternate — which was accepted without a single request for modification (go figure). Since we couldn’t kill the nun, we ripped off the church instead, having the Penguin use computer crime to embezzle all of the money from the arch-diocese (a Cardinal, to keep the bird theme alive). it is, we believe, the first time someone was murdered with a Macintosh to the skull…. Somewhere around here we have the original (rejected) outline, which is a real screamer. If I can find it, I’ll post it. God, I hope it’s not on a floppy disk…

My list of published stories

‘Til Death Do Us Part, published in Alternate Kennedys, edited by Mike Resnick, published by Tor books. A horror/dark fantasy story involving Marilyn Monroe coming back as a succubus to make Jack Kennedy’s life interesting. (what’s left of it). This book is seriously out of print.

Going Straight, co-authored with Laurie Sefton (my wife), published in Tales of the Batman Volume 2, Featuring the Penguin, edited by Martin Harry Greenberg from Bantam Books. Penguin discovers computer crime. Features a gruesome death by Macintosh. This piece, much to our surprise, has been reprinted a number of times by DC in various Batman books, usually about the time another Batman movie comes out. This story has actually paid royalties (and those royalties actually bought dinner that night!)

Good Intentions, in Deals with the Devil, edited by Mike Resnick for DAW books. A computer consultant gets hired by God to hack Hell’s databases to save souls. Except it ain’t that easy. First appearance of my computer consultant character who keeps getting hired by fantasy beings.

Fnord and Gord go to the Zoo, published in January 1995 in hardcover in Xanadu 3, edited by Jane Yolen for Tor books . A Fafhrd and Grey Mouser pastiche, sort of. Some day I’l be forced to explain the title — suffice it to say that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the story, other than as an obscure reference to an even more obscure concept I used in designing the characters, but neither I nor Jane Yolen could come up with a remotely interesting and relevant title, so the working title stuck. This is a story where I not only blow up the fourth wall between author and audience, I dance the macarena on the remains — and invariably, people either love it for the humor or hate it for the humor — and in a few cases, both at the same time.

Birds of a Feather, published in January, 1995 in Witchfantastic!, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin Harry Greenberg for DAW books. A Science Fiction story using Macintoshes in witchcraft. Co-stars Morgan the cockatoo in a supporting role.

Non-Fiction

I’ve done a fair amount of non-fiction writing over the years. Probably my most famous piece is A Primer on How to Work With the Usenet Community, the original guide to using and posting to USENET, written back in 1984, and still in use today with some modification, but it’s amazing how radically the net has changed, and how little that document has. There were a number of people who gave good advice and feedback on the drafts, but this document shows that good writing can really be timeless — and that the issues the net faces today aren’t new by any means. It has been adopted by literally thousands of organizations and translated into at least 20 languages before I stopped counting. It is in the public domain, so it’s free for anyone to use.

I did a regular technical column for the support newsletter back when I was working at Sun, for instance, and I administered the Nebula Awards for the Science Fiction Writers of America for many years, and wrote the Nebula Award newsletter for them. But I’ve had three significant public non-fiction gigs, which if you’re really lucky or crazy, you might run into.

First, a good number of years back, I was a contributing editor to a magazine called Macintosh Horizons. I wrote a monthly piece and reviews for a while (I don’t have the exact dates handy, since all my contracts and copies are in a box underneath a hundred other boxes) until the magazine died.

Second, OtherRealms helped me get a monthly column in Amazing Stories as a book reviewer when that publication was owned by TSR. That column, more than anything else, taught me just how much I hate having a monthly writing deadline (especially when you also have a real job) — there is no hell like being four days from deadline, 2000 words needed to write, no books read and everything in your in-box is either a Dragonlance(TM) clone, a Gor book, or the latest piece of tripe from Piers Anthony.

Finally, my memory of writing a monthly column finally faded enough that when XPlain took over NetProfessional magazine, I offered to write for them. They were silly enough to accept, so I wrote a regular column for them for a few issues. Unfortunately, I ran into severe time constraints, and after five issues, I had to resign the column.

I’ve always been a fan of SF and Fantasy, so it’s no surprise I’ve also been involved to some degree in Science Fiction Fandom, which, in many situations, has only peripheral to Science Fiction and Fantasy and is itself a hobby and a lifestyle. For a while I got very involved in the fanzine pubbing part of SF fandom, and even spent time as a member of FAPA (the Fantasy Amateur Press Association), one of the historic fanpub organizations. All of that fell by the wayside during various work crunches, and now I’m pretty seriously away from all of that — but to be honest, I miss it, but don’t have the time to go get involved again…

Contractually, none of my non-fiction publications can be posted, so you won’t find it here. Most of it is horribly dated and useless by now, anyway, so it’s no great loss, although the book reviews might be remotely interesting still.

OtherRealms

OtherRealms is a Science Fiction Fanzine I put out between 1986 and 1992. It was primarily focussed on reviews and criticism of Science Fiction and Fantasy, but also contained other material that I found interesting. Beyond my own writing, it contained the work of many others, some fans like I was at the time, others authors in the field who were looking for an outlet for informal pieces. Authors who were to be found in OtherRealms included Mike Resnick, Jack Chalker, Charles de Lint, Harry Turtledove, Melissa Scott, Kevin J. Anderson, Michael P. Kube-McDowell, and Lawrence Watt-Evans. I’m proud to admit that at the 1989 World SF convention in Boston (Noreascon Three), OtherRealms was nominated for a Hugo award for Best Fanzine, and I was nominated for Best Fan Writer. I’m even prouder to note that I finished ahead of No Award in both categories, even though there was a voting controversy which affected the Hugos that year.

32 issues have been published. 30 of them were available on the net, while 31 and 32 were paper only. OtherRealms grew out of a wish to find a better way to publish material on the net. You have to realize that back in 1986, things were plain text and distribution was by e-mail and USENET. Even then, USENET was showing signs of strain from growth and popularity, but none of us had a clue how good we had it at the time. USENET today is nothing but a shadow of what it was, quality-wise. A second reason for OtherRealms (other than thinking I had something useful to say) was that I was fighting a serious, nasty writer’s block, and I felt that putting myself on a writing schedule and forcing myself to write (or embarass myself in front of the readers waiting for each issue) would help me break out. It did, but it also took on a life of its own and became a much larger thing than anyone expected.

Of course, in today’s World Wide Web world, OtherRealms looks (and is) horribly primitive. But it was one attempt to find a better way to deliver and distribute information on-line, long before the WWW existed (or was even under consideration). I’ve considered bringing OtherRealms back at times (and when I shut it down, I had two more issues under development; one a standard OtherRealms, one a parody/honorarium issue about Mike Resnick called OtherRealms: The Alternate Resnicks. I still have the pending material in a box somewhere.

Back Issues

Hard Hat Fanzine #1: was a special issue that was published with OtherRealms as a trip report discussing our visit to Brighton, England for the 1987 World Science Fiction convention.