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kinzelA few years ago I was living in Baltimore and working at a dream job -- I was Curator of a growing science fiction collection and, and, and,I got an hour for lunch. The thing was that I didn't really fit the society of academics I worked among -- I was too young, too "other" to learn as much as I should have, I lacked social graces, and I was too young and too other to attract or discover a mentor among the somewhat dysfunctional staff I was immersed in. My major supporters (since i would have needed supporters to survive long in that environment) were in departments outside the library and were not at all on my schedule.
That meant that rather than rushing off to have lunch with my peers (for there were none)my lunch times sometimes got worked through, until a union rep warned me Not To Do That!
So,I brown bagged it, and ate at my desk, sometimes reading from the collection I was putting together, and sometimes using the University's Selectric to write short fiction or book reviews.
OK. Let me say this about that: when we're talking a few years ago we're talking 1974 and 1975, with me not all that long before (summer of '73) having survived 7 weeks away from Baltimore, six of them at Clarion West Writing Workshop in Seattle.
Understand that I was something of a loner, something of a reader, a bit of a writer, and had a plan. I was going to, eventually, be a fulltime writer. I wrote for community newspapers -- music reviews, book reviews, whatever I could while working -- and I wrote short-fiction, selling some of it to markets so small that penny a word was top grade.
Now, for most of my life the US had at least one and sometimes multiple manned space programs. I thought about those programs and after seeing and reading deeply into moon-launches I found myself (fear of heights, yes) imagining what would happen if a Saturn (or the unbuilt Nova!) exploded on the launch pad.
You did know, didn't you, that one of the escape paths for an on-pad emergency of Saturn moon rockets was a zip line?
So over several weeks, whole avoiding my co-workers, I wrote a story about the aftermath of an on-pad explosion at the Cape. Roger Zelazny read and liked it; eventually I sent the story on to Ted White at Amazing, and waited.
Waiting was endemic to writing magazine fiction at that point, and so I waited some more. Then, there was a fire at Ted White's place, and Amazing's deadlines were royally screwed for awhile. Eventually I ran into Ted at a BaltiCon and he looked me in the eye and said -- "You're Steve Miller. Now I remember, I think I really liked that story you sent. Can't find it. Send it to me again, will you? Or bring it tomorrow, I'll be here."
Forty years ago, this year, that story -- Charioteer -- was my first pro rate SF sale to be published.
This all comes to mind because I just read that, which is to say recorded it, and sometime RSN will have to up on Splinter Universe, but before that on Patreon. I got some future things right, I got some future things wrong. We never have had an astronaut for a President, for example. My sort-of laptop computer was called a clipboard (hey, it was written 10 years before Toshiba claimed something they called a laptop computer, but it wasn't one, really) and I predicted a lively funeral-at-space business, and I was really lousy with figuring inflation and the costs of things ...
On the other hand, Charioteer was my first SFWA qualifying story, and I got several more of them from Amazing before the zine went on hiatus and then through a series of changes. Also in that issue were Charles Sheffield, Lisa Tuttle, Gordon Eklund, and Mack Reynolds.
If the audio editing goes well we'll have the story, read by me, up on Patreon come Saturday.
That meant that rather than rushing off to have lunch with my peers (for there were none)my lunch times sometimes got worked through, until a union rep warned me Not To Do That!
So,I brown bagged it, and ate at my desk, sometimes reading from the collection I was putting together, and sometimes using the University's Selectric to write short fiction or book reviews.
OK. Let me say this about that: when we're talking a few years ago we're talking 1974 and 1975, with me not all that long before (summer of '73) having survived 7 weeks away from Baltimore, six of them at Clarion West Writing Workshop in Seattle.
Understand that I was something of a loner, something of a reader, a bit of a writer, and had a plan. I was going to, eventually, be a fulltime writer. I wrote for community newspapers -- music reviews, book reviews, whatever I could while working -- and I wrote short-fiction, selling some of it to markets so small that penny a word was top grade.
Now, for most of my life the US had at least one and sometimes multiple manned space programs. I thought about those programs and after seeing and reading deeply into moon-launches I found myself (fear of heights, yes) imagining what would happen if a Saturn (or the unbuilt Nova!) exploded on the launch pad.
You did know, didn't you, that one of the escape paths for an on-pad emergency of Saturn moon rockets was a zip line?
So over several weeks, whole avoiding my co-workers, I wrote a story about the aftermath of an on-pad explosion at the Cape. Roger Zelazny read and liked it; eventually I sent the story on to Ted White at Amazing, and waited.
Waiting was endemic to writing magazine fiction at that point, and so I waited some more. Then, there was a fire at Ted White's place, and Amazing's deadlines were royally screwed for awhile. Eventually I ran into Ted at a BaltiCon and he looked me in the eye and said -- "You're Steve Miller. Now I remember, I think I really liked that story you sent. Can't find it. Send it to me again, will you? Or bring it tomorrow, I'll be here."
Forty years ago, this year, that story -- Charioteer -- was my first pro rate SF sale to be published.
This all comes to mind because I just read that, which is to say recorded it, and sometime RSN will have to up on Splinter Universe, but before that on Patreon. I got some future things right, I got some future things wrong. We never have had an astronaut for a President, for example. My sort-of laptop computer was called a clipboard (hey, it was written 10 years before Toshiba claimed something they called a laptop computer, but it wasn't one, really) and I predicted a lively funeral-at-space business, and I was really lousy with figuring inflation and the costs of things ...
On the other hand, Charioteer was my first SFWA qualifying story, and I got several more of them from Amazing before the zine went on hiatus and then through a series of changes. Also in that issue were Charles Sheffield, Lisa Tuttle, Gordon Eklund, and Mack Reynolds.
If the audio editing goes well we'll have the story, read by me, up on Patreon come Saturday.
