by Gene Wolfe
Please understand me, Miss Morgan: I have written the whole book, and can send you complete ms. as soon as you ask for it. Will you represent me?
Sincerely yours,
Gilmer C. Merton
Dear Mr. Merton:
Please send the rest of “Star Shuttle.” Enclose $10 (no stamps) to cover postage and handling.
Yours truly,
Georgia Morgan
Dear Miss Morgan:
Enclosed please find the remainder of my book Star Shuttle and a Postal Money Order for ten dollars. I hope you enjoy it.
You can have no idea how delighted I am that you are sufficiently interested in my book to wish to read the rest. I know something of your reputation now, having asked the Chief Assistant Librarian here in No. Velo City. It would be wonderful to have you for my agent.
Sincerely,
Gilmer C. Merton
Dear Mr. Merton,
I will definitely handle STAR SHUTTLE. When you sign and return the enclosed letter of agreement (I have already signed; please retain the last copy for your files), you will be a client of the GEORGIA MORGAN LITERARY AGENCY. Note that we do not handle short fiction, articles, or verse (Par. C.). I would, however, like to see any other book-length manuscripts, including nonfiction.
Cordially,
Georgia Morgan
P.S. Don’t say sci-fi. That is an obscenity. Say SF.
Dear Miss Morgan:
Let me repeat again how much I appreciate your taking on my book. However, I wish you had told me where you intend to market it. Is that possible?
Your letter of agreement (top three copies) is enclosed, signed and dated as you asked. Let me repeat how happy I am to be your client.
Sincerely,
Gilmer C. Merton
Dear Gil,
I sent your STAR SHUTTLE to the best editor I know, my great and good friend Saul Hearwell at Cheap Drugstore Paperbacks, Inc. Now I am happy to report that Saul offers an advance of $4,300 against CDPI’s standard contract. I discussed the advance with him over lunch at Elaine’s (not to worry, Saul paid), but he says CDPI’s present financial position, though not critical, is somewhat weak, and he is not authorized to offer more than the standard advance. (Actually, that is four thou.; I got him up three hundred.) I could be wrong, Gil, but with a first novel, I don’t think you will get a better offer than this anyplace, market conditions as they are. The “standard” contract is enclosed, as slightly altered by yrs. trly. (Note that I was able to hold onto 30% of video rights.) I advise you to sign it and return all copies to me soonest.
Cordially,
Georgia
P.S. You will receive half the advance on signing.
Dear Georgia,
I have signed and dated all copies of the contract for my book. They are enclosed. Good job!
You will be happy to note that I have borrowed enough on my signature to trade in my old Underwood for a used word processor. (These are used words, ha, ha!) Interest is eighteen percent, but there is no penalty for early payment, and when I get the two thousand one hundred and fifty dollars it will be easy enough to pay off the rest of the loan, and I understand that Hijo and several other horror-genre shockers were written on this machine before Steven E. Presley’s untimely death. With the help of this superb machine (as soon as I learn to run the damn thing) I hope to make much faster progress on new book, Galaxy Shuttle.
Sincerely,
Gil Merton
Dear Gil,
This is going to come as something of a shock to you, but I have just had a long phone conversation with Saul Hearwell, during which we discussed what Saul insists on referring to as “your problem.” Meaning yours, Gil, not mine, though you are my problem too, of course, or rather your problems are my problems.
STAR SHUTTLE is bylined “Gilbert C. Merton,” and Saul does not consider that catchy enough. Of course, I suggested “Gil Merton” right away. Saul feels that is an improvement, but not a big enough one. (Am I making myself clear?) Anyway, Saul would like to see you adopt a zippier pen name, something along the lines of Berry Longear or Oar Scottson Curd. Whatever you like, but please, not Robert A. anything. (Gil Donadil might be nice. ???) The choice is yours, to be sure; but let me know soonest so I can get back to Saul.
Cordially,
Georgia
P.S. I rather hate to bring up this delicate matter, Gil, but you will get $1,835, and not the $2,150 you mention. In other words, my commission will be taken out. And don’t forget you’ll have to pay taxes on the residue.
Dear Georgia,
This is a wonderful contraption, but Steven Presley seems to have programmed it with some odd subroutines. I’ll tell you in detail when I’ve figured out what all of them are.
The new byline I’ve chosen is Gilray Gunn. What do you think of it? If you like it, please pass it along to Mr. Hearwell.
I had assumed I paid you your commissions. Rereading our letter of agreement, I see that you receive all payments and deduct your part before passing mine on to me. I see the sense of that—it saves me from writing a check and so forth.
Sincerely,
Gil Merton
(Wolf Moon)
Dear Gil,
Good news! Saul likes your new byline, and I’ve already got a nibble from Honduras on STAR SHUTTLE. Rejoice! When will I be seeing GALAXY SHUTTLE?
Cordially,
Georgia
Dear Miss Morgan:
Thank you for your recent communication. I have altered the title of “Galaxy Shuttle” to COME, DARK LUST. It is to be bylined Wolf Moon, as I indicated on the enclosed ms. See to it.
I require the half advance now due on “Star Shuttle” immediately. North Velo Light & Power Co. is threatening to shut off my service.
Wolf Moon
(Gilmer C. Merton)
Dear Gil,
Saul assured me you will get your money as soon as everything clears CDPI’s Accounting Department. Have patience.
Now—the most stupendous news I’ve passed along to one of my “stable” in many a year! Saul was absolutely bowled over by COME, DARK LUST! He plans sym. hc., trade, and mass market editions. He’s trying to get an advertising budget! He’s talking an advance of $9,000, which is practically a signal that he’s willing to go to $10,000.
Gil, I trust you’re working on a sequel already (COME AGAIN, DARK LUST???), but meanwhile do you have any short stories or whatever kicking around? Particularly anything along the lines of your fabulous CDL? I’d love to see them.
Fondly,
Georgia
Dear Miss Morgan:
I have legally changed my name to Wolf Moon. Gilmer C. Merton is dead. (See the enclosed clipping from the No. Velo City Morning Advertiser.) In the future, please address me as “Mr. Moon,” or in moments of extreme camaraderie, “Wolf.”
I require the monies due me IMMEDIATELY.
Wolf Moon
Dear Wolf,
Saul assures me that your check is probably in the mail by this time.
The obit on “Gilmer C. Merton” was interesting, but didn’t you have to give the paper some disinformation to get it printed? I hope you haven’t got yourself into trouble.
The ten o’clock news last night carried about a minute and a half on the mysterious goings-on around No. Velo City. Have you thought of looking into them? They would seem to be right up your alley, and it is entirely possible you might get a nonfiction book out of them as well as a new novel. (But that poor guy from the electric company—ugh!) Since your name is now legally Wolf Moon, it would be well for us to execute a new agency agreement. I enclose it. All terms as before.
Very fondly,
Georgia
Dear Georgia,
I was sorry to hear of the unfortunate accident that befell Mr. Hearwell’s wife and children. Please extend my sympathy.
While you’re doing it, you might also mention my check, which has yet to arrive. If you could contrive to drop the words “disembodied claws” into
your conversation, I believe you might find they work wonders.
Now a very small matter, Georgia—a whim of mine, if you will. (We writers are entitled to an occasional whim, after all, and as soon as you have complied with this one of mine I will Air Express you the ms. of my latest, THE SHRIEKING IN THE NURSERY.) I have found that I work best when everything surrounding a new book corresponds to the mood. I am returning all four copies of our new letter of agreement. Can I, dear Georgia, persuade you to send me a fresh set signed in your blood?
Very sincerely,
Wolf
2.
Writing
Where I Get My Ideas
(1984)
I wake in the middle of the night to see red eyes staring. They belong to the memory register, and I go back to sleep listening to Duffy swear.
A rat—and it is a rat—is dragging his glasses across the dirt of the hoochie. He swings at it with a bottle of Japanese Scotch, trying to hit the rat, trying to miss his glasses, nearsighted, still a little drunk and half asleep. Of course he misses everything. The soft whoosh of the empty is like the whoosh of my air purifier, a sound half choked with dust.
I hear him rummaging for a flashlight and know he has his .45 in his hand. All of us sleep with guns. Not for the soldiers of the People’s Republic, but the pidgin-English slicky-boy thieves of the ROK. If the Chinese come to wake us, standing over the sleeping bags with burp guns—
“Comrade! Comrade!” God, how do you say it in Chinese?
I snuggle down, pulling the blankets, the comforter around my ears. If Duffy fires, I will wake up. It seems terrifying.
No, not Duffy, not the rat; Flip the ugly clown, wearing Duffy’s wire-framed glasses. I am myself and Nemo too, fearing to be driven again from the Palace of Slumberland.
Flip flourishes Duffy’s gun and fires a flash of light.
And I sit up in bed shaking. The red eyes stare from across the room. (Something horrible is about to happen.) I forgot to turn it off last night.
Or I turned it on last night, turned it on, sitting naked in my fatigues, my mother-bought carpenter’s jeans, to write something I have now forgotten. The room seems so cold. I get up, naked because I always sleep naked, go into the bathroom, run the water and rinse my mouth again and again. I know what the horrible thing is now, and I keep my eyes closed as I brush my teeth.
The windows are gray with summer dawn. The flash of Duffy’s automatic has become a globe of light held aloft by a china seal. The seal’s name is Thurber; I have written it across his chest in gold stick-on letters. My older daughter gave him to me.
The horrible thing has happened. Father and Mother are dead. (I have an awkward picture, somewhere, of Mother, stooped and old, crouching to lay flowers on Father’s grave.) I have daughters old enough to work, sons in college and high school. Boots is dead too and Lance is gone, Sissy, bought to replace Lance, has gone white at the muzzle.
Where is the little house where Boots stretched before the gas fire, where Mother sat crocheting? The brass bookends like old racing cars? Where is lost Atlantis? Lost in the dust. And only I am left to tell you.
Two hours before breakfast, three before I must be at work again. Oh, God, let me begin a new one today, begin new in the midst of the old. Help me now. Perhaps I’ll think of something.
An Idea That …
(1986)
Dear Contestant,
I was one of the judges who read your story; the editor has asked me write you and explain why it isn’t here.
Let me begin by acknowledging that I am not an infallible judge. Nobody is. Only time, the accumulated judgments of thousands of readers, is infallible. And time is infallible only because we declare it so, having chosen it as the standard by which all stories are to be judged. I’ve read forgotten stories that seemed excellent to me, and I’ve read “classic” stories that seemed like limping failures.
Nevertheless, there’s some consistency. I picked the three stories I thought best in one quarter’s entries, and you’ll find all three of them in this book. Unfortunately, as I said, yours isn’t among them.
I’m sorry it isn’t. You had a good idea there, you have a way with words, and you worked very hard. You probably felt you deserved to win; and in a very real sense, you were right. But there were other writers—the new writers whose names and stories appear in this book—who deserved it more, including many who deserved it in a way you didn’t, writers who entered stories of professional quality, and not just good, solid, amateur fiction.
(Have I ever written an amateur story? Oh, yes indeed! Dozens of them. No doubt I’ll write more, if I’m not run over by a truck soon after I complete this. I don’t think there are many of us who don’t produce a good, solid amateur story now and then. You’ve sent me a note occasionally to let me know I let you down, remember?)
Acquaintances are always giving writers ideas for stories, and sometimes we get letters—and unfortunately, phone calls—from people who have an absolutely great, surefire, world-shaking idea they’ll share fifty-fifty (or maybe sixty-forty), if we’ll just do the writing. “And that’ll be a snap. It’ll practically write itself.”
Most of us stopped listening a long time ago. The fact is that it’s very easy to get a good idea for a story. The world is full of them; there’s an idea in every dust mote and every broomstick, and there are scores if not hundreds in every man, woman, and (especially) child you pass on the street.
What about style then, which I called “a way with words” a moment ago? And what about all your hard work? Terrific, both of them, and I loved you for them. They made your story a whole lot better than it would have been otherwise. And yet, strictly speaking, neither was absolutely necessary. Good stories have been written by people who were barely capable of putting them down on paper. Much better ones have been written by talented people who sat down, dashed them off, and sent in the first draft.
Do you know anything about costuming and masquerades? I judged a masquerade a couple of months ago in which all the contestants had filled out forms asking how long they’d worked on their costumes. We judges were given these forms when we retired to decide the awards. Since we had the forms, we tried to correlate the time needed to create each costume with the quality of the costume we had seen.
And we found we couldn’t—there was no correlation. Some costumes had taken six weeks, and one, if I remember correctly, six months; the grand-prize winner had been created in less than ten days. Stories can be like that, sometimes.
Just about every conceivable way of making a costume was represented too. Some of the costumers had worked in cloth, some in plastic or rubber, some in papier-mâché, some in fur. Most had combined two or three materials when they felt they were appropriate.
Ideas were significant, but not especially so. The grand-prize winner had used a fantasy idea that’s been around at least since the middle ages. The prize for the best science-fiction costume went to a contestant who’d taken his idea from one of my books and made no secret of it. What matters, you see, is what masqueraders call the “finish” of the costume—what is done with the idea, the time, and the materials. Would it be good enough for a Broadway show or a big-budget film? Really now. Is it professionally done and professionally exciting?
Perhaps your trouble is that you’re used to approaching stories (including your own) like a reader. The first thing that strikes you is the idea. If it’s a good new idea, that’s great. But if it’s a good old idea, that hardly matters. (I used to work for a man who would read postnuclear holocaust stories, and nothing else.) You may or may not also notice the style, and you certainly notice the effect the story had on you—whether it made you want to call up some friend and tell him all about it, for example. Now that you’ve written some stories of your own, you may speculate about the amount of work the author put into the story, though if you’re honest with yourself I think you’ll admit you can seldom come to any firm conclusion about that. But you’ve had too much fun
just reading the story to notice what was actually going on in it.
When you write a story of your own, you start with a good idea. You try to get the style right for the particular story you’re writing (because no one style is right for every story). You work hard, because you notice that the harder you work the better the story gets. Then you discover that your story doesn’t have the effect on others that you know it should, and you don’t know why. I’m going to tell you—watch my lips.
You didn’t really do much with your idea. You unconsciously assumed that because it was such a fine, strong, sleek, and even potentially dangerous idea, it could run the story by itself.