In looking back at the long history of the ideas that led to Asylum and Mirage, I went back to a 1985 work, “33,” five loosely connected vignettes composed in the hope of fueling new novel ideas. “33,” so titled … Continue reading →
A feckless young architect falls in with a sixteen-year-old’s dubious trucking venture. Drug-addled Randy bemoans his fate as a slave employee in New Fascist Australia. An archeologist arrives on a tiny artificial gravity platform to give a scholarly lecture to … Continue reading →
Recapping Part III as the Author Seeks Sympathy for How Terribly Difficult This Post Has Been In rereading Writing Biographies I-III I’m struck by how they stand outside my usual self-description. I remember all that history, but it was as … Continue reading →
It was eight o’clock. All was well, except that the Animals had somehow crept into the Selector Box and short-circuited the entire Darwin Building. As the Selector, it was my duty to investigate. Yet, at eight o’clock, I’d just finished … Continue reading →
Okay, why revisit this early stuff???? After publishing seven Jack Commer novels I felt a need to pull together Jack’s entire history starting from my first fifth-grade story about him. That was the story that electrified my nine-year-old self. Although … Continue reading →
I’ve already written about The Blue Notebook, my fifth grade stories that channeled fascinating new energy and began defining me as a writer. Recently I was compelled by author’s karma to make an eBook out of The Blue Notebook, and … Continue reading →
Not long ago I was astonished to rediscover childhood Jack Commer marketing tools. As outlined elsewhere, my first Jack Commer, Supreme Commander plots unfolded in the fifth grade, and by the eighth I’d abandoned the draft of The Martian Marauders … Continue reading →
Or: Wandering in the Wilderness with New Discipline, the Consciousness Expansion of Adolescence, and Many To-Do Lists This is an odd period to write about, and only this year, after I made plans to write about first The Gore Book … Continue reading →
A previous post, The First Childhood Appearance of Jack Commer, covered the origin of my space hero Jack in the fall of 1962 and my elation at writing the story “Voyage to Venus” for a fifth grade spelling assignment. That … Continue reading →
I wrote my first stories in July 1960 in Fair Haven, New Jersey, around the time of my second operation for a head injury in a car accident earlier that year. I was seven years old. My friend Sabin Russell and … Continue reading →
