Catching up

View 721 Monday, April 16, 2012

I spent the weekend alternating between doing my taxes and being involved with the Writers of the Future awards stuff. Saturday I went over to Author Services to lecture to the contest winners, and let them trap me into being driven over to the Wilshire Ebell theater to do rehearsal of the awards ceremonies. I usually simply refuse to do that. I know how to hit my marks, and it’s not as if I haven’t done this sort of thing before, or that I get stage fright. Usually Fred Pohl and I take a stand on rehearsals, but Fred wasn’t here this year, Roberta hadn’t come down with me to hear me give a lecture, Joni was her usual persuasive self, and next thing I knew I was in a car with Reznick and Tom McAffrey and some others driving through Hancock Park to what was at one time the Hancock Park Women’s club back in the days when Hancock Park was at least as rich as Beverly Hills and the women of Hancock Park could afford elegance and luxury. The building was constructed in 1929.

I’d been to the Ebell some years ago when Roberta was involved with the founding of the LA Opera company. She was on the Opera League Board for several years, and before LA Opera got the Dorothy Chandler pavilion opera house there were operas in other places, and either they put on one of the operas at the Ebell or there was a fund raiser there. And we went there for some other stuff.

It had fallen into – well, let’s say that it had seen better days. And there was a crew of workmen apparently brought in by Writers of the Future to spiff the place up. Astonishing. Anyway, we had the long and rather dull rehearsal which was a distraction from the taxes and used up Saturday well into the evening. Then Sunday there I was at 1530 in evening clothes because they wanted to get all the photographs before dinner. I was astonished at how great the old theater looked. They had really spruced it up. And the ceremony went well, a bit long but that’s to be expected, so I didn’t get home Sunday night until well after bed time.

And today has been eaten with chasing down papers and receipts and deciding what’s deductible and all the rest of it. I’m on top of it now, and all I have to do is get it entered into TurboTax for the finish. TurboTax is descended from Macintax, which I discovered when it first came out, and I recall in BYTE days advising people to get a Mac just so they could use Macintax because it was so much better than anything you could get on a PC. Eventually it got bought and transformed into a PC program, and I do it now on Emily, the Intel Extreme system along with my old DOS based accounting program that I wrote myself in C-BASIC about thirty years ago. It does things right, and I have had no problems with it, so I’ll finish tomorrow and print these things up.

The Writers of the Future had a somewhat different kind of presentation program, which included interpretive dancing based on the stories and illustrations of the winners. That sounds like Modern Dance which is something I would usually pay money to avoid, but this came off very well indeed. I have to say I was impressed.

I also ran into Arwen Dayton, Sky’s wife, an old friend I hadn’t seen in a couple of years since they moved to a new house away from the beach. Her science fantasy works are selling very well indeed – better than mine, I think. I read her first novel and thought she had considerable potential, and she has kept at it, doing particularly well in eBook sales, which isn’t astonishing. She also looks like she’s still in her teens.

I always have a good time at the Writers of the Future presentations. It’s a chance to get together with some friends I don’t get to see so often now that I don’t go to many science fiction conventions, since WORF pays expenses for all the judges to come to Hollywood (or wherever the event is, I’ve been to one at NASA Houston and another in the United Nations Hall of Nations of all places, but lately they’ve tended to be in Hollywood). This one was a bit more hectic than usual because they expanded the attendance at the awards ceremony by a factor of three or so, and while there were a few glitches it all went well. I have suggested that they add one more feature, given how much they make of the contest winners. In the old Roman Republic (and later in the Empire for that matter) when a Roman general celebrated a triumph, a slave or freedman stood behind him in his chariot, and as the crowds cheer and hailed him, he would endlessly repeat “Remember, thou art but a man.” After the contest is over and the awards are given comes the hard part…

I always take Victor Hanson seriously. His essay on the Zimmerman/Martin affair is worth your time.

Alas, I did not proof read the eBook copy of Red Heroin that is now up on Amazon, and a reader has been kind enough to tell me that it contains a major formatting error, rather consistently putting in a 1 instead of I – and in a first person viewpoint novel that has got to be a terrible distraction. I have asked my agent to get me a final submission copy in Kindle format, which I will proofread myself, and we’ll get the book put up again. Amazon has a policy of giving a free download of a corrected edition to anyone who bought the previous edition; I’ll let you all know when that’s done.

And if you find egregious errors in any of my eBooks, please be kind enough to send me email telling me. Books are intended to take the reader out of his environment and off to the world of the book – at least most of mine are – and I sure don’t want you to have to work to read one of my novels. Mr. Heinlein used to emphasize that it’s the author’s job to weed out breaks in empathy in your stories so that the reader can lose himself in that world. I certainly try to do that.

It’s late and I have to get up and finish the taxes in the morning. I keep trying to catch up…