This is a vintage 1929 Royal Portable typewriter. Over the last week, I’ve purchased six vintage, manual typewriters. “Why the freck would you do that?” you might ask.
Well, I’m a writer, and these are writing devices. Very cool, vintage writing devices.
Also, I’m strange. And obsessive.
I’ve many other reasons. In fact, I will soon detail those reasons on this very site. I am going to write a story (novel?) using one or more manual typewriters. I plan on explaining why and doing a series of articles detailing the experience. (I’ve never used a manual typewriter before. Only an electric for typing class in high school. I got my first computer in 1984 at the age of 8.)
In case you missed it, I conducted an interview with Lou Anders. The interview appeared in the most excellent first issue of Redstone Science Fiction. Below is an excerpt. You can read the entire interview here.
An Interview with Lou Anders
by David Alastair Hayden
Lou Anders is the editorial director of Prometheus Books’ groundbreaking science fiction and fantasy imprint Pyr, as well as many anthologies, including the forthcoming volumes Masked (Gallery Books, July 2010) and Swords & Dark Magic (Eos, June 2010, co-edited with Jonathan Strahan). Lou is a four-time Hugo Award nominee, a Philip K. Dick Award nominee, a World Fantasy Award nominee, and a Chelsey Award winning art director.
Is the life and work of a sci-fi editor at all like you imagined it would be? What are the best and worst parts of the job?
I’m not sure I imagined doing this at all. As a kid I wanted to be either James Bond or Batman, and in college I fell in love with acting and directing. I came into the field backwards, through a series of career shifts, from playwriting to journalism and screenwriting to the dot com industry to freelance anthology editing to here. At each stage, it was always throw myself in and sink-or-swim, so I didn’t have a lot of lead time to imagine what was around the corner. I do remember telling my boss when I was hired that I thought I could do the job utilizing about a third of my day. Ha ! (In my defense, it was initially conceived as a much smaller list and ramped up very fast after I was onboard. Hmmm, could that have been deliberate?).
As to the best and worst parts: The best part—finding a book that has me leaping out of my chair with excitement, a manuscript so good I forget to edit it and just get caught up in the action, then sharing that book with the world. Equal to this is the pleasure (and honor) of working with some of the world’s top illustrators when it comes to creating a cover for these books. At such moments, I am the luckiest guy on earth. The worst part—when something brilliant and deserving fails to catch and find its audience. Nothing more painful.
Within the last few years, the number of fantasy works set in our present day world, but with magical tweaks, has surged dramatically (as have romance hybrids). Do you think something like this will happen with sci-fi as well?
Well, we’ve already been through a wave of “techno-thriller” novels, with a lot of the big names of SF forgoing space for the near future. Greg Bear, David Brin, William Gibson have all been writing novels set in the present, Neal Stephenson even went back into the past for “historical science fiction”. I don’t want to misquote him but I believe Robert J. Sawyer has said something to the effect that he intends all (or most) of his forthcoming work to be like this. As to romance hybrids, I did recently notice a “my boyfriend is an alien” type novel on the mass market tree display in B&N last week, packaged exactly like an urban fantasy only with tentacles. I’m surprised there isn’t more of an SF incursion into urban fantasy already, as that crowd pushes out further from vampires and werewolves. But we’ve also had a flowering of space opera, perhaps coming out of that now. And parallel universe novels, with its sub-sub-genre of steampunk, are all the rage.
Read the rest of the interview.
They will tell you not to write with adverbs. In fervent whispers, they will warn of adjectives, too.
Bullshit and bollocks.
Write however the hell you want to. If it entertains, people will like it.
I spent many years trying to write the way they told me to. You know how they do, those English professors, critics, and copy-editors. If only I’d just written what was inside me instead of editing so much, I’d have written a lot more.
All the adverb chopping they recommend won’t make a dull work entertaining, and it damn sure won’t make you any happier.
My recommendations: Read a lot of good writing. Read a little bad writing. Learn from both. And try to find your style, your voice, the way the words flow out from you. Molest that style as little as possible.
» Read the rest of this entry «
