Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 35

movin' on

Back in the Seattle airport after a quiet weekend in the smallest con I've attended in years.  I think the final count was 140.  Back to the bustle of fame 'n' fortune in Beantown and beyond.Joe

left-overs

So I'm lugging around this 497-page pile of paper that's called THE BEST OF JOE HALDEMAN.  It occurred to me to haul out my bibliography and make a list of all the stories that weren't good enough for that 19-story collection.  Amazingly (to me), it comes to 58 tales, which might be  compiled in --

THE SECOND-BEST OF JOE HALDEMAN

26 Days, on Earth

A !Tangled Web

A Mind of His Own

A Separate War

A Time to Live

All the Universe in a Mason Jar

Anniversary Project

Armaja Das

Beachhead

Blood Brothers

Brochure

Civil Disobedience

Diminished Chord

End Game

Expedition, With Recipes

Faces

Fantasy for 6 Electrodes

Feedback

Finding My Shadow

Foreclosure

Forever Bound

Four in One

Giza

Graves

Heartwired

I of Newton

If I Had the Wings of an Angel

Images

Job Security

John's Other Life

Juryrigged

Never Blood Enough

No Future in It

None So Blind

Odd Coupling

Out of Phase

Passages

Power Complex

Saul's Death

Seasons

Seven and the Stars

Starschool on Hell*

Starschool*

Summer's Lease

The Best of All Possible Worlds

The Cure

The Mazel Tov Revolution

The Moon and Marcek

The Private War of Private Jacob

The Woman Hurter

The Only War We've Got

Time Lapse

Time Piece

To Fit the Crime

To Howard Hughes:  A Modest Proposal

We Are Very Happy Here

What Johnny Did on His Summer Vacation

You Can Never Go Back

-- and yes, there are a few I might have kept in the book.  But editor Jonathan Strahan did have to draw the line somewhere, and I wouldn't criticize his judgment.  I'm just really surprised the number is so large.  I didn't think I'd written nearly so many short stories.  (The two starred titles are collaborations with my brother Jack.)

up in coffee country

Better type fast; my battery is running down, here in the lovely lobby of the Marriott hotel in Redmond, a suburb of Seattle . . . drinking truly good coffee, sitting next to an ornamental but warming fire.  Still dark out.The trip was 'way long, as we had to go south to Atlanta and wait in the airport there before heading west and north to Seattle.  But I had the galleys of my story collection, THE BEST OF JOE HALDEMAN, to proofread.  I got more than halfway through.  (That Haldeman guy is one wordy S.O.B. – 497 pages of short stories and novelettes.)Edd Vick picked us up at the airport and took us to a restaurant, the Toreador, where another dozen fans had gathered.  Nice Mexican place; I had a Dungeness crab tortilla, yum.  Couldn't follow much of the conversation in all the noise, but it was a good time.  The stress of travel did catch up, though, and by the time we got to bed, well after midnight Boston time, I was walking on my heels, as Gordy Dickson used to say.  I never could quite visualize that.Joe

letter to a student

Answering some questions from a young writer headed to college:

. . . I definitely would discourage getting a degree in writing.  Too wishy-washy.  Writers ought to use college to learn stuff to write about.  Classics is perfect.  What you learn studying the ancients is applicable everywhere, and knowing Latin and/or Greek sets you apart nowadays.  (Used to be common, when it was generally required.  I was right on the cusp of that – my brother was a year ahead of me in public school, and he had to take Latin.  When I got to the ninth grade I was allowed the option of General Science, and jumped at it.  A pity, because a curious kid picks up science everywhere.  You don't just stumble onto Cicero and Virgil, though.)

The question "What do you do if/when you are roughly halfway through a novel and discover the plot could have gone in a totally different direction, and your fresh idea appeals to you more than the original?" is interesting because it has happened to me in many novels.  I always abandon the original idea and follow the new one.  (Unless a book is "work done for hire," where the person with the paycheck has already okayed a specific plot.)

I wrote to the Iowa Writers Workshop and sent along a copy of my first novel (not sf), saying "I want to write for a living, and if you give me a teaching assistantship (plus the GI Bill) I can go for two years without getting a job."  They signed me on, and that's what I did.  In fact, I was pulling down three or four hundred dollars a month (when rent was $100) from short stories in the sf magazines.  So we were pretty rich by graduate-school standards.  (They would never have accepted me if they'd known I was a, gasp, science fiction writer.)

What I meant by the "invisible cage" metaphor is that the pursuit of writing for money does put restraints on how experimental your work can be, but after you've been doing it for some years, you no longer notice the restraints.

You should follow your own star.  I had to stay in school because I knew that I would be drafted and sent to Vietnam as soon as I graduated.  I might have learned more with a library card and free time.  (Of course the caveat to that is that there are really useful things that you would never try if not for the demands of curriculum.  In my case, differential equations and advanced symbolic logic.)

Good luck

Joe Haldeman

Entering the lists

Well, la de da.  NPR did a poll of 60,000 readers to come up with a list of the best 100 science fiction and fantasy books, and The Forever War came in around the middle, #56.

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/1390858...

Joe

fan mail

This morning in the fan mail was a letter from a student who wanted to know "what it is about writing that most compels you. Why have you chosen (or perhaps the subject has chosen you, as the case may be) science fiction as your main focus?

I told her "It's hard to say what 'compels' me as a writer.  It's something I do every morning; I have no more need of compulsion than anybody else who has to work for a living.  Sometimes an idea does grab you by the throat and almost writes itself – that is compulsion and it's wonderful.  But if I waited for it, I wouldn't have written many books.

"I think I mainly write science fiction because that's what I most enjoyed reading when I was young.  It was a fortunate choice, since you have a great latitude in what you write about.  Not so much latitude, perhaps, on how you write.  (You grow not to notice that.   A cage with no visible bars.)"

Joe

How do you say "oink" in Mongolian?

Gay and I, along with much of convention fandom of the eighties, were introducedto Mongolian BBQ at the Worldcon in Brighton, back in '87.  The restaurant wasonly a couple of blocks from the convention hotel, and hundreds of fans wentthere every night.You have to wonder what the proprietors thought when they saw this small armyof fat hungry people converging on their buffet once a day to tuck in theirdaily five thousand calories.   They can't have made any profit from us.  Themaitre'd maintained a frozen grimace that was not at all inscrutable.That was one of the most pleasant cons ever.  My happiness peaked when I went to a used books store nearby and picked up a copy of _Modern British Poets_.  I didn't realize I still had my name tag on.  The salesman wouldn't take my money -- he said my work had given him such pleasure, he had to make me a gift of the book.  That happens . . . let me see . . . once every 42 years, so far.Joe

Pigging out in Beantown

Wonderful where a subway pass and undefined hunger can take you.  Looking for coffee and a nibble and a place to work, I biked down to South Station.  Found out that Sunday is not a great time to look for a place to work in downtown Boston.  Even Starbuck's is closed.  South Station had coffee and such, but not a single place to sit, and a bad level of crowd noise, everybody going out for their Sunday holidays.

I decided not to bike downtown – I did a long ride yesterday and don't want to overdo it – so I hopped on the T and rolled on down to Harvard Square.  Surely, with all those studious Crimson lads and lasses, there would be plenty of coffee.

Not really.  The Starbuck's was open but jammed.  I walked around and descended into weirdness.   Fire & Ice, which I normally thought of as an evening place, was open – and wild!  At least for someone who will eat almost anything and lots of it.  Lively calypso music and dozens of beers on tap.

Not a breakfast for the oatmeal crowd.  It's a Mongolian-barbecue-type place, where you pay a set fee ($16) and fill your bowl with a combination of meats, vegetables, starches, and spices, and give it to a guy who's manning a huge wok, a metal circle about twenty feet in diameter.  He sprays a square foot or so with oil and stir-fries your mélange.  I did a combination of beef, pork, lamb, and bacon, with lots of onions and scallions, with a scoop of noodles and a ladle of spicy garlic sauce.

It was good.  It was so-o-o good.  It was so good I did it again.  I hadn't even gone to the seafood station, which I know I should have done first.  Not limited by formalism, though, I got a couple of nice fish filets (tilapia and trout) and some shrimp and crab meat, along with green onions and lots of garlic and a heap of transparent Chinese noodles and some chunks of potato.  Laced them all with Mango Garlic Mojo sauce and had the guy stir-fry it all.

Oh me oh my.  I'll have to come back when I'm hungry.

Joe

(Actually, a true trencherman would have gone on to the desert station, and perhaps would have started with the pastries.  It is breakfast, after all.)

food and laughs

(Writing to Judith Clute, who was describing the trials of putting together a dinner party with a vegetarian and a vegan . . . )

I can imagine the dinner problems, with one a Vegan. Two others probably from Betelgeuse and Arcturus. "Here, you must try the rock salt and gravel."

I wore myself out a bit yesterday biking. Only seventeen or eighteen miles, but it takes at least twice as much work to push this old thing around, compared to a modern road bike. Three times as much.

(That's usually okay if there aren't too many hills. Guess I'm a little out of shape.)

Feeling very good after all the exercise. May ache tomorrow.

Had a very pleasant dinner, a stand-up reception for the writing department, excellently catered at the very stfnal Stata Center (a Geary phantasmagoria). Lots of too-rich food and good imported wines and beers.

After dinner, Gay and I decided to walk over to the Kendall movie theatre and see what was on, and so slipped in a few minutes late to see Sleepwalk With Me, an endearing indie comedy about an earnest standup comic on the edge of making it in New York. A lot of the material that he stages is genuinely funny, and the parts that don't work are well calculated to advance the story. He does sleepwalk as he drives around the northeast doing gigs in Podunk towns, lending a frisson of danger to the amusing storyline. (Never get a room on the second floor.) His parents are perfect foils to his mixed success; his girlfriend is a good mixture of support and repressed why-can't-you-do-something-normal?

The walk/subway home took about 45 minutes, much of it through forbidding dark streets, and that's probably going to figure into our evening plans when it gets colder.

Joe

working and walking

This morning I worked for three hours and as many pages at the Dunkin' Donuts down by the river. For the past several days I've done that, and it just registered that the same thing has happened every morning at about 7:30 or 8:00 . . . a man in a grey suit parks his plain American car in an illegal spot and takes a few slips of paper out of the glove compartment and goes away for maybe fifteen minutes. Sometimes he makes two short trips. Comes back and drives away.

Golly. I wonder why he never gets a ticket.

It was a nice day for walking. I went back and picked up Gay and we set off to a local café, Barlow's, where I had an excellent fresh fried fish filet. Then we wandered up the river a ways to an old favorite place, the Barking Crab, for a beer and some waterfront atmosphere. Crossed the river and went to a hokey tourist joint where they have a replica of one of the dangerously small ships that brought suckers over to the Massachusetts Colony. Didn't go in this time; just had a cup of tea and bought some loose tea at the tea room.

Then we looped around to a handy channel and got back to the apartment in time to avoid some rain.

Junot Diaz came by at five with Marjorie Liu, and we drove down to Chinatown for dinner at his favorite Chinese place, the Dumpling Cafe, where we dumpled well. On the way back we spotted an oddity, a little Australian restaurant, KO. Checked it out and picked up some Aussie stuff. Only a few blocks from here, so we'll check it out soon. (It has the true Aussie hamburger, with beetroot and all.)

Didn't rain until we were safely home. Slaved away over computers for awhile; I quit and played guitar for awhile. Will have to do a 30-minute concert in a few weeks at a con, so I'd better get some of my chops back.

Joe