{"id":8065,"date":"2023-02-15T19:18:42","date_gmt":"2023-02-16T02:18:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/?p=8065"},"modified":"2023-02-15T19:18:42","modified_gmt":"2023-02-16T02:18:42","slug":"before-we-were-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/2023\/02\/15\/before-we-were-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Before We Were Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

We all have to start somewhere, even National Treasures like Howard Waldrop.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 (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).\u00a0\u00a0 He started making up stories almost immediately, before he could even talk.\u00a0\u00a0 I think his first word was “Shemp,” but that may be an urban legend.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 He wrote and wrote and wrote.\u00a0\u00a0 And no one wrote like H’ard.<\/p>\n

Eventually people began publishing his stories.\u00a0 Fanzine editors at first.\u00a0\u00a0 Howard was there at the birth of comics fanzines in the 1960s, the same as I was.\u00a0\u00a0 That was how we met, back in 1962, when I bought a copy of BRAVE & BOLD #28 (Starro the Conquerer, yay!) for a quarter.\u00a0\u00a0 Howard had only paid a dime for it, so he made a big profit.\u00a0\u00a0 He was always a canny businessman.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Those were heady days in comics fandom, and for me and Howard too.\u00a0\u00a0 We both began to publish stories around the same time\u00a0 (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.\u00a0\u00a0 (Howard lived in Texas.\u00a0 I did not).\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 Howard, though publishing in comics fanzines, stayed clear of superfolks (well, until Jetboy).\u00a0\u00a0 His stories featured Roman legionaries, the Three Musketeers, hardboiled PIs in small Texas towns, a swordsman called\u00a0 Wanderer, the Flying Wing, and… well, pretty much anything and everything.<\/p>\n

None of us knew quite what to make of Howard, or his stories.\u00a0\u00a0 But we loved them.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0 the due course of time, the prozines started to take note as well.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 I made my first sale right around the same time, a story called “The Hero,” to GALAXY.\u00a0\u00a0 Other sales followed, for both of us.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Eventually both of us had published enough stories to publish collections.\u00a0\u00a0 Howard called his HOWARD WHO?<\/p>\n

But we knew.<\/p>\n

He did not include everything in HOWARD WHO? though.\u00a0\u00a0 He left out some of his early professional sales, and of course all those fanzine stories.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

We couldn’t have that.\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 We call it H’ARD STARTS: The Early Waldrop.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I’ve never edited an anthology that was more fun.\u00a0\u00a0 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 <\/em>(the one about the Flying Wing still moves me), even a sketch he wrote for Red Skelton, who did not buy it.\u00a0\u00a0 (Imagine if he had, and Howard had gone on to a career writing comedy for television.\u00a0\u00a0 That’s a truly Waldropian alternate world).<\/p>\n

But there’s more than just fiction here.\u00a0\u00a0 Brad sat down with Howard for days, and compiled an amazing set of interviews about the history of every one of these pieces.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

And now Subterranean Press is bringing it out, in one of their gorgeous limited edition hardcovers.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Here’s the pre-order page:\u00a0\u00a0 https:\/\/subterraneanpress.com\/hstew\/<\/a><\/p>\n

All the money from the sale of H’ARD STARTS will be going to Howard himself.<\/p>\n

Oh, and I almost forgot.\u00a0\u00a0 All of the books are SIGNED<\/em><\/strong>.\u00a0\u00a0 By Brad Denton.\u00a0\u00a0 By yours truly.\u00a0\u00a0 And by the one and only Howard Waldrop, his own self, sage of Austin, father of Jetboy, National Treasure.<\/p>\n

Get yours now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 (Yes, that is also the day Jetboy died and the wild card virus […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[218],"tags":[48,89,183,19],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8065"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8065"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8065\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8072,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8065\/revisions\/8072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}