... received payment from Analog ...
May 8, 1999
7:55 a.m.
Hey, I'm a science fiction writer. If I want it to be Thursday morning all day Friday, that's my prerogative! For those of you who either don't come in through my front door, or weren't paying too much attention, my date and time scripts were stuck greeting folks with "Good Morning", and "Today is May 6" all day yesterday. Yeah, it was my danged mistake. It's a long story. Call it the price of not paying enough attention and working on more than one machine. Anyway. My copy of Locus came yesterday, and like always, I grabbed it and perused the little news blurbs about who had sold what. Then I moved straight to the section where writers are interviewed (see? Another instance of me reading like mad! Just can't get off that topic, can I?). always enjoy reading about other writers. I guess I like to know that the field is populated with real people that are, in most ways, pretty much like me and you--only not quite. Maybe this is why I like going to conventions, too. I like to see who writers are. This month, one of the interviews is Lisa Goldstein. It pains me to admit that I haven't read a whole lot of what she's written--she writes a lot of novels, right, and as you know from yesterday, that's not my thing these days. I did enjoy her Nebula nominated "Fortune and Misfortune," and I've seen more of her short stuff. So I can at least say that I've seen some of her work, and I've enjoyed what I've seen. But I thought she had some really good things to say about writing. In specific, she gave the first definition of magic realism that I've ever heard that makes sense, that being that magic realism is when the story is set such that magic isn't considered anything special or unique in that world--it's just there, like the air. No one is surprised by it, and it's almost no big deal to the characters. I really like that. Maybe everyone else has heard it put this way before, but I've always kinda stumbled over the phrase and never really been able to come to grips with it. So, I just called it a marketing term. Of course, I'm right, too. I know marketing folks. In my pay-the-bills business, our company gives tons and tons of money to specialized firms so that they can purposefully misspell names that are then trademarkable. [NOTE: I would worry about whether "trademarkable" is a word or not, but given the topic of discussion, I think it works better if I just let it go, okay?] Hence, we get Insite and Intelect and Cense and Celect, and all sorts of other names that, in reality, just go to show that we must be really good engineers because we sure don't know how to spell. But marketing folks need terms to sell stuff by in the publishing business, too. And Magic Realism sounds pretty danged spiffy. However, I'm glad I finally have a definition in mind that makes sense to me. Makes me think all is right with the world, you know? Of course, you're talking to the guy who lived an entire cyber Friday as Thursday morning, so what the heck do I know?   Have a good one.  Where do you get off saying Marketing guys can't spell, eh? Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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"I realized you could write an exciting story with an interesting plot, and people could just read it and say, 'Oh, what a cool story,' but someone else could read it and see what's deeper. That was a great revelation to me, that you could write on both levels at once." Lisa Goldstein in Locus |
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