David Hartwell's Three Rules for Traveling Overseas

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I'm back from three days traveling, up to Massachusetts and back, for David Hartwell's memorial service.

I am not going to write about the service. there was a good-sized crowd of mourners. The family was there. Speeches were made. Emotions were sincere.

Instead, I'm going to pass on what Geoffrey Hartwell said was his father's advice when he traveled overseas for the first time. It is, I believe, useful. So here it is:

1. Never stand when you can sit.

2. Never sit when you can lie down.

3. Eat a salad every day.

This is what we call Good Advice. If you take it, you'll be helping to keep a good man's memory alive.

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And As Always...

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I'm on the road again. 

This time, for a sad reason. David Hartwell's funeral will be held in Massachusetts on Thursday morning. So I'm driving up to New England, where Marianne and I will overnight with friends. Then, in the morning, we'll pay our last respects to a man I've known for almost forty years.

Funerals are not really about the person who died, but a service paid to the community of people who survive him or her. We show up to say: Yes, your grief is appropriate. We feel something very similar. You are not alone.

These are important things to say. If we did not say them, we would not be human.

At the same time, it must also be said: All humans die. To feel grief over the death of someone who lived a full three-quarters of a century is to say that said person led such an extraordinary life that for him to die pretty much when the actuarial tables said he would is tragic.

As indeed it was.

Good night, David. And flights of teen angels sing thee to thy rest.

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The Toughest True Words You'll Ever Read on Writer's Block

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Writer's block -- real blockage, I mean, not simply being stuck on a particular story or not having any idea of what to write next, but the inability to write anything worthwhile, no matter how much effort you put into it -- is one of the most terrifying things that can happen to a writer.

I know this because roughly thirty-five years ago, after making several sales and seeing my first two published stories appear on the Nebula ballot, I came down with a world-class case of it. Every day I sat down at my Selectric and typed until I had several pages that went nowhere, accomplished nothing, and had to thrown away. Day after day, it was the same story. Over and over and over again.

Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to relieve writer's block.

Unfortunately, most of them don't work.

I tried them all. I followed Raymond Chandler's advice and had a man with a gun walk into the room. "Holy cow, he's got a gun!" one of my characters cried. Another said something else. And several pages later, the plot had gone nowhere and the prose had accomplished nothing and every word of that day's work had to be thrown away. I tried a lot of other sure-fire tips as well. None of them worked.

Day after day. Month after month. Something in my subconscious did not want me to write and would not let me write. For nine months. During which, I also lost my job and got married.

That's terrifying.

There's a happy ending to this story. I finally found the cure. I kept writing, every day and as hard as I could, despite not getting any results until finally my subconscious got the message that preventing me from doing any productive writing was not going to get it out of sitting in front of the typewriter and typing for hours every day. So it gave up.

Here is the hard and simple truth: All those tricks may work for some writers at some times. None of them are reliable. The only thing that really works is to keep on writing. Even though you hate it. Even though every word you write is dreadful. Even though you loathe the sight of the trash you're creating. You have to keep on keeping on.

Even worse, though it worked for me, it is not guaranteed to work for everybody every time. Nothing is.

But if you don't keep on writing...


Above: I'm boxing up some of my duplicate publications to go into the attic. These are a small fraction of them.

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Ten Best Tweet Fictions

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About a month and a half ago, I started posting very short SF & fantasy stories on Twitter, one a day. I called this project Tweet Fictions.

On Sunday, I'll post my fiftieth Tweet Fiction. In my experience, there's not a lot of overlap between people who read my blog and those who follow me on Twitter. For which reason (and because Fridays are a good time for light material) (particularly just before a blizzard) (and why this abundance of parenthetical asides, anyway?), herewith are the ten best -- strictly in my own opinion, of course -- to date:

12/14/15: The good news is that the world is going to end tomorrow. You probably don’t want to hear the bad news.

12/22/15: Philip K. Dick just materialized and told me everything is as it seems. Should I be worried?

12/28/15: The best proof of mass amnesia is the fact that we call this planet Earth -- as if it were the original one, and we'd always lived here.

12/31/29: It took every penny in our budget to put astronauts in Pluto. Show me where in the contract it says we had to bring them back.

1/1/16: This year I resolve to smash the time machine before I can go back and kill my younger self for smashing my time machine.

1/2/16: Had vision of Judgment Day: God asked how much string I'd collected.

1/3/16: Now that machines run everything, humans can focus on creative endeavors. Online solitaire, mostly.

1/15/16:There are some things man was not meant to know. Or so the High Matriarch of Earth tells me.

1/17/16: Weather alert: Timestorm today. Your sequence out of may go actions.

and of course, yesterday’s:

This tweet contains all human knowledge plus fourteen words as of April 17, 2114.  

And the best response was . . .

On December 23 of last year, I tweeted:

The day after I said that women can't write hard SF, Nancy Kress showed up at my door with a neutron gun.

Nancy Kress responded that it would take more than one neutron gun to kill me.

Nancy is too kind. For an ordinary hard science fiction writer, it would take more than one. But Nancy Kress is no ordinary hard science fiction writer.

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Otters From Nowhere

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Life goes on. Last night, I went to a reading by Lawrence Schoen from his new novel, Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard. During the questions and comments period somebody from his writers group mentioned that in an earlier draft, he had had "otters out of nowhere," which everyone insisted he remove. It was implied that there was no way those otters could be made to fit into a story. So what the heck. Right here, right now, before breakfast, I'm going to give it a whack:

Otters Out of Nowhere

It was the otters from nowhere that first let us know that reality was not what we thought it was. Followed by the massive clouds of orange balloons over the Arctic. The appearance of a giant statue of a croquet player across the river from the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. The morning everybody in Ireland woke up wearing (removable, thank goodness!) red clown noses.

A great deal of research later, we have determined that Somewhere there is a control room where reality is manipulated, or perhaps orchestrated is the better term. From it, Somebody or Something is able to adjust the parameters of our existence.

Further, responsibility for the control room periodically passes from one Entity to another, and the times reflect the personality of Whomever is in control. This is why historical eras differ so greatly from one another. This is why the era of Greek philosophy and literature is so unlike that of the Hundred Years War. This is why the inspiring figures of the American Revolution were followed by an era of scoundrels.

This is why yesterday Mount Rushmore turned to lime jello. Reality is currently being run by a practical joker. And not a very funny one. Just look at Its works!

Don't even get me started on Donald Trump.


Above: For Lawrence Schoen. Beware of elephants bearing knives.

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David G. Hartwell: In Search of the Holy Grail

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Photo by and Copyright © Andrew I. Porter

I was in Chicago a couple of years ago for Gene Wolfe's induction into the literary hall of fame there when the phone rang and David Hartwell said, "I'm sitting in Fred Pohl's kitchen with him, going through J. K. Klein's photos, looking for pictures of old time writers. Do you want to join us?"

You bet I did.

I think back to that brief call and I can hear him grinning. The joy in his voice was infectious. That was the key to David G. Hartwell: he loved science fiction, he loved work, he loved making worthwhile things happen. The photos were for an expanded version of The Way the Future Was, which I don't think Fred lived to finish. Even if he had, he would have gotten no credit for those hours spent going through literally thousands of black-and-white photos in search of the rarely seen, and he knew it. This is the core condition of an editor: to get credit for only a fraction of what you do. Those who cannot live with that fact quickly move on to some other line of work.

But, David being David, he had an ulterior motive as well. "I'm searching for the Holy Grail," he said. "I know it's in here somewhere..."

Now David Hartwell is no more.

There is some confusion as to whether he's technically dead yet. And it seems unclear whether bleeding in the brain caused him to fall down a flight of stairs or the fall caused the bleeding. But the doctors hold out no hope that he will ever regain consciousness. So my friend is gone.

Christ, I'll miss him. Every year at Readercon we used to meet in the bar while everybody else was at the Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition and have a serious conversation about the art of science fiction. Talking about the current state and literary potential of our genre. David had no interest in the competition, hilarious though everybody said it was. "I've read enough bad prose in my life that I don't need to seek out any more," he told me.

Yeah, me too, David.

The list of things he's done -- just those I know about -- would go on forever. Here's an extremely abbreviated version: He was a book reviewer for Crawdaddy, edited The Little Magazine, co-founded The New York Review of Science Fiction and the NYRSF Readings series (both of which will continue after him), chaired the board of directors of the World Fantasy Convention and administered the Philip K. Dick Award. Mostly, he edited. He edited the Year's Best SF series, and a number of magisterial anthologies -- "bug-crushers" is the technical term -- on Hard SF, Sword & Sorcery, Twentieth Century and early Twenty-FIrst Century SF, Horror, and so on. He found and nurtured a many great writers. He edited Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series. He was a book dealer, huckster, and collector. At various times, he filled pretty much every ecological niche in the publishing world.

He loved science fiction and he worked all his adult life in and for it.

And -- let it be said here -- he found the Holy Grail. Near the end of that long morning spent hunched over Fredrick Pohl's kitchen table, David Hartwell cried "Eureka!" and, luminously happy, held high the photograph he had been searching for. It was a photo of the young William Gibson at his very first science fiction convention, which he had convinced his mother to drive him to,. He was dressed as the Lizard King.

I don't know where that photo is now. You'll probably never get to see it. And that's the absolutely smallest reason that your world is the poorer for not containing David G. Hartwell anymore.


Above: David. Smiling. That's the way he should be remembered.

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Blue Collar Batman

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Don't talk to me about Batman. You didn't know him. I did. I used to help him work on the Batmobile weekends. Sometimes, when crime was slow, we'd sit on the stoop, drink a beer or two, and just shoot the breeze. He was an okay guy, Bruce was. Big Packers fan.

All that bull about him being rich? C'mon. When was the last time you ran into a billionaire volunteering in a soup kitchen, much less putting his life on the line to save regular people? Batman was blue collar to the bone. Lived in a third-floor walk-up near the El.  Worked on the docks when that was available. Took temp jobs when it wasn't.

The Batmobile wasn't like what you see in the movies, either. It was a '57 Chevy that he spray-painted a flat black. I helped him do that, a long time ago, before people used respirators. God knows what the stuff I inhaled has done to my lungs. It was a rush job because there was something big going down that night, and when Bruce put on his costume and jumped behind the wheel, we discovered we'd covered the headlights too. Later, we laughed about that, but it wasn't funny at the time. You shoulda heard us cussing as we scrapped off the paint.

Old Bruce died in '78. Lung cancer. He always said the cigarettes would get him in the end. It really came as a shock to those who knew him. We all thought he'd last forever.

Like I said, a real sweetheart. One time, when I was out of town and my mother's toilet overflowed, he came right over and fixed it for her. Wouldn't take a penny for it, though of course Mom offered. That's just the kind of guy he was.

His real name was Waynzowski, by the way. He was a Polack. But we never held that against him.

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