Writing Report January 8, 2022

I’ve begun working on my January 2022 project.

It’s going nicely.

Not well, but nicely.

Nicely insofar as I’m managing to do some work every day, but after a couple of 2K days there follow a few days with less than 500 words.

Still, 500 words are better than no words.

Nicely insofar as the story if flowing, and as I write, to new relationships and linkages and ideas presenting themselves.

Nothing that will drastically alter the story, just plus it out.

Not well in the sense that this first draft is going to be a really rough draft, loose and shaggy, underwritten in places where I’m going to need to go back and do further research now that gaps, weak spots, and rough patches have been revealed.

I tend to come pretty close to a final draft with my first drafts, rarely going through more than one big rewrite.

This one is going to take at least two.  The story now works on a skeletal level, but it needs its sinews and flesh before it can be turned loose on the world.

I won’t be surprised if my second big project for the year is finished / polished / ready to show before this one.

. . . 

In addition to the big project for January 2022, I’m also doing concurrent research on the big project for June 2022.

That one requires a lot of technical info on the state of TV broadcasting in the late 1940s.

Now luckily I found an online goldmine of old tech manuals, books from the early days of TV, etc., but I still need to talk to people who can clue me in on a lot of less-than-obvious details that, by the very nature of my story, I’ll need to know.

Simultaneously I’m scouting agents to handle last year’s major project, just fired off three short stories to three markets, and am doing a variety of other bits of writing.

This weekend I hope to find time for yet another Batty ‘bout THE BAT installment, this about three direct knock-offs of the original play / movie.

As I mentioned before, my days are not 100% my own.

I need to help Soon-ok around the house and at the garden, there are errands to be run, we look after our grandson twice a week.

I really can’t get down to the business of writing until after Soon-ok turns in at night, typically 10-10:30. 

If I’m lucky, that buys me 3 hours of uninterrupted writing time.

With the big project on, I’m not going to have time for watching movies late at night or doodling sketches or reading.

This is why I try to schedule projects at healthy intervals.

Gives me a cushion if they run longer than expected, but also allows me some time to recoup.

. . .

Sooo…why the Harlan Ellison books? 

Decades ago when we downsized I sold my Harlan Ellison books, assuming they’d always be available to re-acquire later. 

But one of the frustrating things about collecting Harlan’s books is that there are so many under so many different titles and editions with different content from earlier editions. 

On top of this, Harlan also disavowed several editions, as well as mixed and matched earlier works into later volumes, not to mention special collector editions. 

So trying to collect all of Harlan’s work is both daunting and expensive. While I purchased several of his later works, I opted not to fill in all the blanks. 

I did decide, however, to get a complete run of the Pyramid editions. These were reprints of many of Harlan’s earliest work including Spider Kiss (a.k.a. Rockabilly), Memos From Purgatory, and other non-sf stories (yes, I’m aware of Sex Gang, a more recent anthology of Harlan’s even earlier work originally published under his Paul Merchant pseudonym; I’m passing on that because I’ve read a lot of Harlan’s work from that era in various sci-fi digests on the Internet Archive and frankly, his stuff at that time for the bottom tier markets just wasn’t that good). 

Pyramid originally intended seventeen volumes in this series but when they were bought out by Jove the series was truncated to eleven titles. 

Thanks to Roger Freedman, I now possess those eleven.

Two years ago, having missed the 50th anniversary of Harlan’s groundbreaking original anthology Dangerous Visions, I re-read the volume, planning to do a story-by-story, intro-by-intro analysis of the book.  

There’s a yellow legal pad with notes for that sitting on my desk; I put the idea aside in order to find time to do a similar analysis for his follow-up, Again, Dangerous Visions.

Now, with the acquisition of the Pyramid titles, I’m planning a little reward for myself once I get the first draft of the January project put to bed:

I’m going to re-read those volumes and Again, Dangerous Visions and the original hardcover of Love Ain’t Nothing But Sex Misspelled (with significantly different content than the paperback version) and write blog commentaries on all of them.

Hell, I might even do a compare & contrast on the Ace and Pyramid versions of The Glass Teat.

(I won’t do this with his later books because there’s too much overlap among them, but these early volumes from the mid-1970s proved tremendously influential to me as I began to concentrate more seriously on becoming a writer.)

© Buzz Dixon