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<\/p>\nHoward Waldrop died on January 14 in Texas, of a stroke.\u00a0\u00a0 He was 77 years old.\u00a0 (Two years my senior, barely).<\/p>\n
The world got a little darker then.<\/p>\n
I learned of Howard’s passing through a phone call from a mutual friend.\u00a0\u00a0 I was away from home when it happened, out of the country, with no email and no internet, else I would have posted something here much sooner.<\/p>\n
Howard and I never lived in the same city, nor the same state, but we had been friends for a long long time.\u00a0\u00a0 When we first “met” — via comic fandom and the US mail — John F. Kennedy was in the White House and both of us were in high school, Howard in Texas and me in New Jersey.\u00a0\u00a0 I had just bought a comic book from him.\u00a0\u00a0 BRAVE & BOLD #28, as it happened.\u00a0 Starro the Conquerer.\u00a0\u00a0 Howard charged me a quarter.\u00a0\u00a0 When he sent the comic, he backed it up with a nice drawing of a barbarian on stiff cardboard, and a friendly letter asking me if I liked Conan.\u00a0\u00a0 We struck up a correspondence that lasted more than half a century.\u00a0 We finally met in person in 1972, at MidAmerican Con in Kansas City.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He was my oldest friend from the SF community… the kindest, brightest, funniest man you could meet… \u00a0 and one of the greatest writers of his generation.<\/p>\n
He was one of\u00a0 a kind.\u00a0\u00a0 There will never be another like him.\u00a0 But he only wrote one-and-a-half novels, so he never got the acclaim (or the money) that he deserved.\u00a0 These days, short story writers get little respect (’twas not always so, at least in SF and fantasy) and less money.\u00a0 And Howard Waldrop was among the very best short story writers ever to work in our genre.<\/p>\n
And certainly the most original.<\/p>\n
I last spoke to Howard less than a week before his death.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He has been living in an assisted living hotel in Austin for the past few years.\u00a0\u00a0 We have been adapting a few of Howard’s classic stories into short films, and our mutual friend Robert Taylor had just screened a rough cut of MARY-MARGARET ROAD GRADER for him on his laptop.\u00a0 (Howard did not use a computer and had no truck with email, texts, or social media).\u00a0 I was calling to ask if he liked it.\u00a0 He did, I am pleased to say… and I am so so so happy that he got to see the film before he left us.\u00a0\u00a0 He was not entirely happy when we spoke… he had fallen out of bed a few days before, and had required help to get back up.\u00a0\u00a0 That made him grouchy.\u00a0 Howard gave good grouchy.\u00a0\u00a0 But talking about the film cheered him up.\u00a0 That was good to hear.\u00a0\u00a0 He was laughing by the time we ended the call.<\/p>\n
We are making a couple of other Waldrop adaptations as well, and I promised him I’d get him a cut of those as well before the end of January.\u00a0\u00a0 I never dreamed when hanging up that we would never speak again.<\/p>\n
There’s so much more I could say about Howard… and I will, I will. \u00a0 But not today. \u00a0 This would turn into a novel if I told all my stories in one long post. \u00a0 So many memories.\u00a0 So much laughter. \u00a0 So much love.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I still cannot believe he is gone.\u00a0 I want to call him up right now, and hear him laugh again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Howard Waldrop died on January 14 in Texas, of a stroke.\u00a0\u00a0 He was 77 years old.\u00a0 (Two years my senior, barely). The world got a little darker then. I learned of Howard’s passing through a phone call from a mutual friend.\u00a0\u00a0 I was away from home when it happened, out of the country, with no […]<\/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":[334,58,7,19],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8538"}],"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=8538"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8538\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8563,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8538\/revisions\/8563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}