Not a Blog

Remembering Howard

August 22, 2024 at 9:29 am
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On June 29th, while I was off in Europe stumbling from country to country with Parris and our mighty minions, Howard Waldrop’s friends and fans and loved ones held a memorial for him in Austin Texas.

I was not able to be there in person (we were in London at the time) but there was no way I could not be a part of a remembrance for H’ard, so I taped some remarks and sent them to Robert Taylor, who was organizing the event.   I went on rather a long time, as it happens, but Howard and I had a long history and I am a wordy bastard in any case, as many of you know.  My tape ended up coming in around 45 minutes long, and could easily have gone three hours if I’d just kept talking.  There are so many stories to tell.

That was too long for the Austin memorial, so Robert and his team kindly cut and trimmed it for the event.   I do have the longer version and will likely post it here… probably later rather than sooner.   For now, we have this; not only my video, but all the other speeches and stories as well, from some of Howard’s pals.   (Some, not all.  Howard had friends all over the world.

Parts of this may bring a tear to your eye.   Other bits will make you laugh.   Laughter was one of Howard’s gifts.

And thanks go out to Robert, who organized the memorial and put all of this together.   (Not easily, I am sure.  Fans and writers are as easy to herd as cats).   Robert’s own segment, at the end, is especially moving.

 

Current Mood: melancholy melancholy

The Choc’lit Throne

January 26, 2024 at 10:35 am
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My readers sometimes astonish me.

And never more than last week, when the baker and chocolatier  at the Rosewood Mayakoba resort left a surprise for Parris and me in our suite:  an amazing replica of the throne of the Seven Kingdoms as seen on GAME OF THRONES.

Instead of iron, however, this throne was made entirely of CHOCOLATE.

 

It was, it must be said, a helluva throne, and every bit as delicious as it was imposing.

The dragon was cool too, and he actually breathed fire.

The throne was so large that there was no way we could eat all of it… but we did give it the old Westerosi try.   Yum Yum.   The chocolate dragon and the chocolate skulls came home with us.

It was a wonderful gesture.  I have some amazing fans, as creative as they are generous.

And if you’re ever in the Yucatan, the Rosewood Mayakoba is a fantastic place to stay.

Current Mood: hungry hungry

With Gargy and H’ard

January 21, 2024 at 7:49 am
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I sold my first story and attended my first science fiction convention in 1971.   It was a Disclave, in Washington D.C.

I appeared on my first panel five years later, at a Windycon.   By that time I had published a score of stories, lost the Campbell Award, lost two Nebulas and a Hugo… and won a Hugo.   It was not easy to get on panels in those days.  You had to pay your dues.

Subsequently I have appeared on dozens, if not hundreds, of panels, at more cons than I can count.   Some were fun and some were boring.   Some were serious and some were goofy.   Some were good and some were terrible — terrible for the audience, in some cases, and terrible for the panelists, in a few cases.   That’s another kind of paying dues.

A few I still cherish in memory, and none more than this one, a panel without a topic that I did with Gardner Dozois and Howard Waldrop at Capclave in 2013.   Mostly it was just the three of us telling stories of our years in the wild and wooly fandom of our youth.

https://youtu.be/nvdsmhQYTyc?si=euiRU7DQOQss9WBm

It seems like it was only last week we did this panel… but no, 2013 was eleven years ago, I am shocked to realize.   Here we are, talking about the good old days, and now the panel itself is part of those good old day.

And now Howard and Gardner are both gone.  That makes me the last of the three stooges, I guess.  (The Stooges were always favorites of H’ard, especially Shemp).

 

Current Mood: melancholy melancholy

Once upon a time there was a worldcon…

March 23, 2023 at 9:49 am
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The night I won two Hugos.

Seems like last week.

Seems like a million years ago.

Robert Silverberg was toastmaster (he was a great toastmaster, the best worldcon ever had)  and handed me the rockets.  I have forgotten every word he said.   I have forgotten every word I said, for that matter.   (I wonder if anyone was filming the ceremony.   These days all the Hugo ceremonies are videotaped, but in the days of yore, that did not always happen).   My whole night is a blur… but I do remember how happy I was… and the friends I shared the night with.   Phyllis Eisenstein, Mary Mertens, Ed Bryant… so many more… and of course, Gardner Dozois, who squirted whipped cream in my hair and formally threw me out of the Hugo Losers’ Party.

Once upon a time there was a worldcon…

Current Mood: melancholy melancholy

Before We Were Us

February 15, 2023 at 7:18 pm
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We all have to start somewhere, even National Treasures like Howard Waldrop.

Howard — or H’ard, as our mutual friend Gardner Dozois used to call him — came into this world on September 15, 1946, which makes him even older than me.  (Yes, that is also the day Jetboy died and the wild card virus was loosed upon an unsuspecting world, which is not as coincidental as you might think).   He started making up stories almost immediately, before he could even talk.   I think his first word was “Shemp,” but that may be an urban legend.    It was a couple of years before he started writing, but once his little hands were strong enough to start pounding the keys on a manual typewriter, there was no stopping him.   He wrote and wrote and wrote.   And no one wrote like H’ard.

Eventually people began publishing his stories.  Fanzine editors at first.   Howard was there at the birth of comics fanzines in the 1960s, the same as I was.   That was how we met, back in 1962, when I bought a copy of BRAVE & BOLD #28 (Starro the Conquerer, yay!) for a quarter.   Howard had only paid a dime for it, so he made a big profit.   He was always a canny businessman.    We started corresponding after that, when stamps were only three cents, although we did not meet in person until a convention in Kansas City in 1972.

Those were heady days in comics fandom, and for me and Howard too.   We both began to publish stories around the same time  (Publish, not sell, no one was paying us a penny) in fanzines like CORTANA, HERO, and STAR-STUDDED COMICS, the big photo offset zine from the Texas Trio.   (Howard lived in Texas.  I did not).   I was writing amateur superhero stories starring characters created by the Trio, like Powerman and Dr. Weird, and some of my own creation, like Manta Ray, the White Raider, and Garizan the Mechanical Warrior.   Howard, though publishing in comics fanzines, stayed clear of superfolks (well, until Jetboy).   His stories featured Roman legionaries, the Three Musketeers, hardboiled PIs in small Texas towns, a swordsman called  Wanderer, the Flying Wing, and… well, pretty much anything and everything.

None of us knew quite what to make of Howard, or his stories.   But we loved them.

In  the due course of time, the prozines started to take note as well.   Howard’s first professional sale was a story called “Lunchbox,” which the legendary John W. Campbell Jr. bought for ANALOG a few weeks before he died.   I made my first sale right around the same time, a story called “The Hero,” to GALAXY.   Other sales followed, for both of us.    Eventually both of us had published enough stories to publish collections.   Howard called his HOWARD WHO?

But we knew.

He did not include everything in HOWARD WHO? though.   He left out some of his early professional sales, and of course all those fanzine stories.   Some of those had been published on ditto’ed fanzines that were fading more with every passing day, and were in danger of being lost to the ages.

We couldn’t have that.   So I got together with my friend Bradley Denton (an amazing writer himself, author of BUDDY HOLLY IS ALIVE AND WELL ON GANYMEDE, which really needs to be a movie), and we put together a collection of Howard’s early work, most of it long out of print.   We call it H’ARD STARTS: The Early Waldrop.

I’ve never edited an anthology that was more fun.   We’ve got the Wanderer stories here, we’ve got Howard’s con reports (including his account of our first meeting), we’ve got “Lunchbox” and “Billy Big-Eyes” and “My Sweet Lady Jo,” and the never-before published “Davy Crockett Shoots the Moon,” a couple of plays he wrote in college, his essays for Crawdaddy (the one about the Flying Wing still moves me), even a sketch he wrote for Red Skelton, who did not buy it.   (Imagine if he had, and Howard had gone on to a career writing comedy for television.   That’s a truly Waldropian alternate world).

But there’s more than just fiction here.   Brad sat down with Howard for days, and compiled an amazing set of interviews about the history of every one of these pieces.   Howard’s recollections are not always accurate (I was there for some of them), but they are funny, and moving, and give us a peek into his own life, and the lost world we lived in during the 60s and 70s.

And now Subterranean Press is bringing it out, in one of their gorgeous limited edition hardcovers.

Here’s the pre-order page:   https://subterraneanpress.com/hstew/

All the money from the sale of H’ARD STARTS will be going to Howard himself.

Oh, and I almost forgot.   All of the books are SIGNED.   By Brad Denton.   By yours truly.   And by the one and only Howard Waldrop, his own self, sage of Austin, father of Jetboy, National Treasure.

Get yours now.

Current Mood: pleased pleased

At the Smodcastle

November 23, 2022 at 2:19 pm
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New Jersey is in my blood.   I was born in Bayonne in 1948, and hardly set foot outside the city until I finally went off to college in 1966, way way off to Northwestern in scenic Evanston, Illinois.   Most of my family still lives in the Garden State, and I like to get back to see them whenever I can… which has not been very often since the pandemic hit two years ago.   I need an occasional Jersey bar pie too, the best pizza in the world, and Judickes’ sprinkle donuts from old Bayonne.

Kevin Smith is a Jersey boy too, and a hard core nerd and fanboy.   He has had his own comic book shop in Red Bank for years; they even had their own TV show.   More recently, Kevin bought an old 1920s movie theatre, refurbushed it, rechristened it the Smodcastle, and reopened it.   I was delighted when he invited me down for a night of conversation.

It was a ton of fun.

And turnabout is fair play, so watch this space.   Kevin will be headed down to the Land of Enchantment next year, to speak at my own mini movie palace, the Jean Cocteau Cinema.

Woot!

Current Mood: dorky dorky

Talking Tolkien — and My Stuff Too

November 20, 2022 at 8:32 pm
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My appearance with Stephen Colbert was another highlight of my trip back east.

You may have seen the episode as aired, but that one was cut for time.   The full version appeared only on line.

This was the second time I’ve appeared on the Colbert show.   It is always a lot of fun.   Stephen is a big a fanboy (did someone say nerd?) as I am, a fan of science fiction, fantasy, comic books, and all the other stuff I love.  He knows Niven, he knows Zelazny, he knows Arthur C. Clarke…

… and don’t ever try to out-Tolkien him.  After the show wrapped, we hung out in the green room for a couple of hours, talking TV shows and movies and books and Roger Z (a dear friend and mentor to me, and one of Stephen’s favorites), and in the course of time the subject of Gil-Galad came up (as it will).   I immediately said…

Gil-Galad was an elven king
of him the harpers sadly sing
the last whose realm was fair and free
between the mountains and the sea

Which is, alas, the only part I have memorized

Stephen stepped in at once, and recited the rest of the poem.

Well, of course he did.   The man speaks Elvish.

I don’t even speak High Valyrian.  Much.

Valar dohaeris

Oooh… and I almost forgot the cold open.

That was fun too.

 

 

 

Current Mood: cheerful cheerful

Farewell to an Ace

August 15, 2021 at 3:13 pm
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I am very saddened to report that we have lost another of our Wild Carders.

I received word yesterday that Steve Perrin, the writer/ creator who gave us Mistral, her father Cyclone, and the ace reporter Digger Downs, died at his home in California.   I am told that he died painlessly in the night, from an atrial fibrillation.

Steve had been part of Wild Cards since the beginning… BEFORE the beginning, actually… though he never actually wrote a story for us until the triptych in our latest volume, JOKER MOON, which just came out.   I am very pleased that he was at least able to see his story in print and hold the book in his hand before he passed away.   But his contributions to the series went way, way beyond that one tale.   Steve was a game designer, a mainstay at Chaosium and other game companies, and was one of the creators responsible for such landmark RPGs as RUNEQUEST and CALL OF CTHULHU.   He was also the writer and designer for SUPERWORLD, the role-playing game that inspired Wild Cards.   Without his game, there would never have been a Wild Cards series.

I first “met” Steve when both of us were in high school (me in New Jersey, him in California), writing amateur superhero stories for the ditto’ed fanzines of the fledgling comics fandom of the 60s.   I met him the same way I met Howard Waldrop  (who was also writing for the same fanzines) — through the mails, and in the lettercols and comments sections.   He was a very prolific writer, turning out far more stories than me and Howard combined, and creating dozens of characters… among them, the very first African-American superhero of the Silver Age, the Black Phantom… who made his debut in a fanzine well before Stan Lee and Jack Kirby came up with the Black Panther.

Perrin was also one of the founding members of the SCA, and loved games.   He was a big DIPLOMACY player, as I recall, and later on, with high school and college behind him, he made his career designing and writing role-playing games.   There was none better.  I have no doubt that if he had decided instead to write for Marvel or DC, he would have been just as successful.

I never actually met Steve in person until the worldcon in San Jose in 2002, but we kept in touch, off and on, over the decades.   He was a true ace, and all the gamers out there will miss him, as will our Wild Cards readers, and his fellow members of the WC consortium.

Current Mood: sad sad

Paying It Forward

June 1, 2021 at 10:07 am
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Heinlein said it best.   You can never pay back the people who helped you when you were first starting out, so all you can do is pay it forward, and try to help those who come after.

Those words, and the sentiment behind them, have always resonated with me, and I have done my best to Pay It Forward.  One of the ways I’ve tried to do that is with the scholarships I sponsor — to Clarion and Clarion West, Odyssey, and the Taos Toolbox, to IAIA here in Santa Fe, and through the Stagecoach Foundation.

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from one of those scholarship recipients, who had some exciting news to share:

“My name is Isabel Cañas and I was the first recipient of your Worldbuilder scholarship to attend Clarion West in 2018. I said hello and introduced myself to you briefly after the Hugo Awards ceremony at WorldCon in Dublin in 2019. I’m writing with the wonderful news that my debut Gothic horror novel, The Hacienda, recently sold in a major deal at auction and will be published by Berkley in Spring 2022.

I am also writing to say thank you, from the bottom of my heart. Attending Clarion West is a life-and career-changing experience for many writers; I can attest the same. It gave me the courage to write in new genres and explore my identity as a Mexican-American writer in a space that was both safe and that pushed me hard to improve my craft. I grew immensely as a writer during those six weeks and the months and years after. Without Clarion West, I do not believe I would have been able to write the novel that will be my debut.

In 2018, I would not have been able to attend Clarion West without financial aid. Because of the doors that the workshop experience has opened for me, I now find myself in a position where I can extend that generosity to the next generation of students: I will be funding one Latinx student to attend Clarion West in 2022. Currently, it is a one-time scholarship, but in the future, I hope to be able to follow your example and fund an annual scholarship.”

I was pleased as hell by Isabel’s big sale, and look forward to reading her novel.

And I am even more delighted to hear that she herself will also be Paying It Forward, by sponsoring an even newer writer at Clarion West in 2022.   I think Heinlein would have been pleased as well.

((Isabel adds, “If it’s not too much trouble to add a link to your post, I am happy to report that The Hacienda is now on Goodreads, if your readers would like to add it: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57840571-the-hacienda  “))

 

 

Current Mood: pleased pleased

Covid Claims Another Friend

March 5, 2021 at 3:23 pm
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The Grim Reaper just keeps on reaping, sad to say.

I have lost another friend.   Last night I got a phone call from Michael Cassutt in LA to tell me that our mutual friend Dr. Michael Engelberg had died.   He was a victim of Covid-19, one of the half million we have lost.

Dr. Michael was a physician himself, an oncologist at Cedar-Sinai in Los Angeles, and one of the leaders in his field, though he retired from active practice a few years ago.    Thankfully (knock wood) neither I nor anyone in my immediate circle ever needed to call upon his expertise in the treatment of cancer… but having a good friend who was also a doctor at one of the leading hospitals in the country was definitely something to be thankful for.   He was always the first person I turned to for a second opinion whenever Parris or I had a medical issue of any sort.   There was no one better.   Twenty years ago, asking him for that second opinion saved Parris from having an entirely unnecessary heart procedure, for which we will be eternally grateful.

Dr. Michael lived a double life, however.   By day he was a physician, one of the country’s leading oncologists.   But he was also a hardcore science fiction and fantasy fan, and a film producer… and it was in that capacity that I first met him, back in the early 90s.    I was doing a lot of screenwriting in those days, and Engelberg was looking for writers to script some of the projects he had in development at Disney, so my agent set up a breakfast for us… at Hugo’s, I believe.   (That was a big industry breakfast-and-lunch place in those days.   The food was great…. and, of course, with a name like that, there was no place better for two old fanboys to get together and talk SF).   We hit it off at once, and two decades of friendship ensued.

We also worked together.   Michael was a decade older than me and had been reading SF all his life.   He had an amazing collection, especially of Golden Age material.   He loved Asimov, Heinlein, Sturgeon, Simak, and his dream was to bring some of their classic works to the silver screen.

His favorite was Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Barsoom novels.   Michael was the producer who first brought A PRINCESS OF MARS to Disney, and got it optioned by Hollywood Pictures, a Disney subsidiary.   For more than a decade he fought to get it filmed.   Writer after writer took a crack at it, and at least once the project got a greenlight with a director attached… but then the director demanded another rewrite, and the studio did not like it much, and the green light turned to red.   The director left, and more writers came and went… the last team being me and Melinda Snodgrass.   We did a couple of passes ourselves, and for a while it seemed we were going to get a green light for our version… but then the Mouse changed his mind, decided PRINCESS needed to be animated instead of live action, and took it away from us and Hollywood Pictures and assigned it to Disney proper.  Where nothing happened.   In later years the Disney option expired, and the Burroughs estate sold the rights to Paramount.   Nothing happened there either, alas.   So Disney came back into the picture and bought back the rights to Barsoom, but the Hollywood Pictures division was defunct by then, so a whole new group of people took charge of the project.   I don’t think they ever even looked at the old scripts.   Instead they made JOHN CARTER.   Dr. Michael was not connected with that, and I think it broke his heart a little… but that’s development for you.

A PRINCESS OF MARS was his passion project, but by no means the only one he worked on.    There was a time back in the 90s when I had four — yes, count ’em, four — films in active development at Hollywood Pictures, and Dr. Michael Engelberg was the executive producer and guiding hand on all of them.   Besides PRINCESS, Melinda and I were also developing WILD CARDS as a feature film, collaborating on a screenplay built around our own most iconic characters, Dr. Tachyon and the Great and Powerful Turtle.   Michael also picked up the rights to FADEOUT, an original SF screenplay I had written for a small independent that had gone bust.    For a time there was talk of attaching Sharon Stone to that one, but when that fell through, so did the project.  And Hollywood also optioned my historical horror novel, FEVRE DREAM.  I was so busy with other work — the aforementioned PRINCESS, WILD CARDS, FADEOUT, as well as three television pilots, the Wild Cards books, and this fantasy novel I had started in 1991 — that I did not get around to writing the screenplay for FEVRE DREAM for a while, alas.   Big mistake.   By the time I turned in the script, Hollywood Pictures was on its last legs and had lost all interest in steamboats and vampires.   They put the script in turnaround the day after I turned it in.

None of that was Dr. Michael’s fault.   He was as frustrated as any of us by the vagaries of development hell.   Maybe more so.   I loved working with him, maybe because he had a trufan’s reverence for the original material.  Whether dealing with ERB, RAH, or GRRM, he always argued for staying with the book and doing faithful adaptations.

In the end, Dr. Michael only got one of his numerous projects filmed: the 1994 adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s THE PUPPET MASTERS.  That was another book he brought to Disney, and it gave him great joy when the cameras finally began to roll… although I know he would rather that one had stayed a bit closer to RAH’s novel as well.   If Hollywood had more sense, PUPPET MASTERS would have been the first of many Michael Engelberg productions.  Instead it proved to be the first and last.

My friendship with Michael lasted much longer than our working relationship.   Whenever I visited LA, I would make sure I made time to visit him, so we could catch up and talk about the books we’d loved and the movies we wanted to make.   Our favorite haunt was Hop Li, a Chinese restaurant in LA’s Chinatown, where we would gather around a big round table and share a feast with other writers, fans, and movie people.   Melinda Snodgrass, Michael Cassutt, Alan Brennert, Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, David Goyer, Len Wein, Chris Valada were all regulars at our Hop Li gatherings.  And you never knew who else might turn up.   One time it was Deke Slayton, which was pretty damn exciting.

If Covid ever ends and I get to return to LA again, I hope those of us who are left can gather at Hop Li once more and raise a toast to Dr. Michael Engelberg over some tangerine beef, peking duck, and walnut shrimp.   He was one of the good ones.

 

Current Mood: depressed depressed