Marty Halpern's Blog, page 17

At the beginning...

I get asked, quite often, how I got started as an editor -- but to tell that story (for another time), I have to start at the beginning....
I would have to blame two teachers as initially responsible for getting me into this mess: my seventh-grade English teacher, whose name, sadly, I have unfortunately forgotten (give me a break, it was 3,000 years miles away, in Pennsylvania, and many (many) years ago....), and my twelfth-grade Journalism teacher, Mrs. Doris L. (I'm using only the initial of her last name, to protect the guilty, of course....).
In seventh grade English we learned -- studied -- had hammered into our very being -- sentence diagramming: complex sentences, over and over and over again, such that I could diagram entire paragraphs in my sleep. This taught me to spot misplaced modifiers, incorrectly referenced pronouns, etc., etc. with the eye of a sniper siting through a scope. Unbeknownst to me at the time -- one doesn't think beyond the present moment when one is being hammered! -- she taught me the beauty, the rhythm, of an elegantly written complex sentence.
Mrs. L, on the other hand, was more of a facilitator, a mentor, but more on that shortly. One of my fellow staff members on the school newspaper was Mike W. He had the responsibility each issue to share with readers the goings-on at other high schools. So Mike traded copies of our school newspaper with dozens of other schools throughout the U.S. He came up with a name for his column: "The Lid's Off." You and I know, of course, the double meaning of that title, but not so the faculty of our high school at that time. When each issue of the school newspaper was published, we all got a bit of a high-school chuckle seeing that column title. Yes, I know, it's very sophomoric, but then again, we were all sophomores.... (Actually, we were seniors, but you get my point.)
For whatever reason, Mike W. quit high school about the halfway point and enlisted in the U.S. Navy. We weren't best friends, so I never learned his rationale for such a decision, just one day he was at school, and the next day he was gone, and Mrs. L. informed us of his actions.[1]
Once Mike was no longer on the newspaper staff, Mrs. L picked me to take over his column. I liked the name of the column, but the content was BORING. Imagine reading dozens of high school newspapers each week, and selecting the most exciting news to share with your fellow students. It was probably what drove Mike to enlist in the Navy! This school in Utah is hosting their annual spelling bee. And this school in North Dakota had to cancel their father-daughter event because white-out snow conditions resulted in road closures. Like I said, BORING.
So, I approached Mrs. L with a suggestion for a change in subject matter (but keeping the column title, of course!) -- content that would be of more interest to students given the current climate: a music review column. Thankfully she agreed, and I was issued official school press credentials.
And let me tell you, those credentials got me in free to so many concerts, and the occasional backstage pass, too -- and one-on-one interviews with many of the performers... I truly never minded having newspaper "homework" on evenings and weekends.
But I digress.... Mrs. L taught us that, because a newspaper has limited space, each word must count, each word must be critical to the content: there is no room for luxury. We edited our own writing, and then we edited each other's writing. After which, Mrs. L would review our work and show us what poor editors (and often writers) we really were.
The newspaper class, at least for me, was an escape from the reality of the rest of high school. Because I went to a lot of concerts in the evenings and during weekends, I often used my time in newspaper class to study and catch up on homework for other classes. I guess as long as I was working, regardless of what I was working on, Mrs. L never hassled me. I found her class a sanctuary.
At the end of my senior year, she signed my yearbook:

Martin -
You may have felt imprisoned in school this past year, but in reality you've been "growing" in a very visible, if gradual, manner. You are one of my most "memorable" students.
~ Mrs. L

---------------Footnotes:
1. All of which made no sense in the overall scheme of things because a few months later, I read a brief article in the newspaper (the Orange County Register), with the headline "Sailor Jumps Ship in Japan" -- about two column inches worth of text -- stating that one Mike W. from Anaheim, California, along with a fellow seaman, jumped ship in Japan and was currently AWOL. After that, I never heard, or read, anything further about Mike W. -- so Mike, if you're out there reading this, post a comment, will you?
Notes:
I'm choosing to keep the name of my high school confidential as well. But if you do your homework, you can figure it out: Singer/songwriter Tim Buckley (who passed away in 1975) graduated from my high school, as did the co-writer on most of his songs, Larry Beckett; they were, in fact, classmates. Singer Gwen Stefani (with the band No Doubt, and currently a judge on The Voice) graduated from my high school as well. And lastly, bassist Jim Fielder also graduated from my high school. Jim played with the original Blood, Sweat & Tears; he also did stints with the Buffalo Springfield and the Mothers of Invention.
Speaking of which, the background music while I'm writing this post is Frank Zappa's You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore 12-CD box set (literally, a wooden box!).  Never could get enough of the song "My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama."

Forthcoming from Tachyon Publications in 2016: Pirate Utopia by Bruce Sterling

(More to follow, after I begin work on this novella.)

Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Each year, as part of the Hugo Award voting process, readers and fans also vote for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
To be eligible for the Campbell Award, an author must have made his or her first professional sale within the previous two years.
If you want to read new, cutting edge, and possibly the next wave-of-the-future fiction, these are the people -- and stories -- to read.
And you can do that, now, and for free! Up and Coming is an anthology of stories from the 120 Campbell-eligible authors for this year's award. These authors have contributed 230 works of fiction totaling approximatly 1.1 million words. The anthology is available as a free download in both epub and mobi formats for your reading -- and voting (if you are a member of this year's WorldCon) -- pleasure.
On BoingBoing, author Cory Doctorow writes:

It's a very broad and deep survey of the next generation of SF/F writers. I won the Campbell in 2000; other winners since then include Seanan McGuire, Jay Lake, Naomi Novik, John Scalzi, Jo Walton, Elizabeth Bear, Mary Robinette Kowal, Lev Grossman, Mur Lafferty and many, many other exciting writers.

And from the Up and Coming website:

...These pieces all originally appeared in 2014, 2015, or 2016 from writers who are new professionals to the SFF field, and they represent a breathtaking range of work from the next generation of speculative storytelling.
All of these authors are eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2016. We hope you'll use this anthology as a guide in nominating for that award as well as a way of exploring many vibrant new voices in the genre.

But let me remind you once again that these free downloads will only be available through March 31, 2016.

IF Science Fiction Magazine: The Entire Run Now Available Online

Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress:
serialized Dec. '65 through Mar. '66Courtesy of the Internet Archive, the entire run of IF magazine -- 176 issues from March 1952 through December 1974 -- is now avilable online.
Here's an excerpt from the magazine's Wikipedia entry:

[If] achieved its greatest success under editor Frederik Pohl, winning the Hugo Award for best professional magazine three years running from 1966 to 1968. If published many award-winning stories over its 22 years, including Robert A. Heinlein's novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and Harlan Ellison's short story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." Several well-known writers sold their first story to If; the most successful was Larry Niven, whose story "The Coldest Place" appeared in the December 1964 issue.

If (no pun intended) you have a desire to read some Golden Age science fiction -- online and for free -- then the If archive is awaiting your reading pleasure.
[Thanks to io9 and boingboing for the link.]

Print Edition: The Labyrinth of the Flame by Courtney Schafer

Let's see...I need to recap a few past blog posts on Courtney Schafer's Shattered Sigil Trilogy.
In my April 29, 2015, blog post I was reading mobi editions of the first two volumes of Ms. Schafer's trilogy: The Whitefire Crossing and The Tainted City . All of this in preparation for working on volume three, The Labyrinth of Flame , as Ms. Schafer had hired me to do a full line and copy edit on the 219,000-word manuscript. (Just an FYI, that's 756 manuscript pages! Whew....)
As I stated in the blog post, Courtney launched a Kickstarter campaign in support of The Labyrinth of Flame , the first two volumes having been published by Night Shade Books. The Kickstarter was fully funded (funded by 284%, to be exact) -- and by my November 10, 2015, blog post, all Kickstarter contributors had received their maps and ebook editions of The Labyrinth of Flame. Since the Kickstarter print editions were still in process, the author shared with her readers the interior illustrations that would be included in the print edition.
By my January 5, 2016, blog post, all Kickstarter contributors had received their signed trade paperback copies of The Labyrinth of Flame -- and I had received my signed comp copy as well. So the Kickstarter campaign was officially complete.
Though the ebook edition of Labyrinth has been available these past few months to the reading public, what has (pleasantly) surprised Courtney has been the demand for print copies of the book beyond those she had printed specifically for the Kickstarter. Back to the drawing board, so to speak.
She again contracted with Thomson-Shore, the same printer who had provided the Kickstarter print editions. In her recent blog post announcing the general availability of print copies, Courtney explains why she again went with Thomson-Shore (quality, quality, and...quality) rather than self-publishing the books via Create Space or Ingram Spark.
So, if a print edition of The Labyrinth of Flame, book three in the Shattered Sigil Trilogy, is what you so desire, then make your way to Amazon.com or the Seattle Book Company to purchase a copy.
If you are not familiar with Courtney Schafer's Shattered Sigil Trilogy, then get ye to courtneyschafer.com, where the author has posted multiple sample chapters of each of the three books. Check it out, sample the samples, then go buy all three volumes of the Shattered Sigil Trilogy.
And enjoy the read.

Redux: The Record Store of the Mind by Josh Rosenthal

In my January 7, 2016, blog post I wrote that I had received a copy of Josh Rosenthal's memoir The Record Store of the Mind -- and I included a bit about the author himself, and that he started his own record label, Tompkins Square, in 2005.
On Monday, I finished my current editing project (Barbara J. Webb's What Dreams Shadows Cast, book 2 in her Apocrypha: The Dying World series; more on this soon) -- so I was able to pick up The Record Store of the Mind and continue reading. In fact, just this morning I finished the book, but TRSOTM is the type of book -- actually a reference -- one goes back to repeatedly: What was that Tia Blake album Josh recommended? And that list of obscure acoustic guitarists? What were those two special Charlie Louvin albums, and the duets he did with Lucinda Williams... And then there are the nine pages at the end of the book entitled "Listen Up!" in which Josh recommends album after album of "old-time" music for your listening pleasure.
But what I wanted to share with you is the closing paragraph of Josh Rosenthal's memoir. Whether you are a book collector and reader, or a music lover and listener, you will (unfortunately) be able to relate to what Josh has written. Following Hurricane Sandy, in which Rosenthal lost some 500-plus albums, many autographed, due to flood damage...

I did learn from the experience. I look at my collection differently. It used to seem like some indestructible totem, a shrine I had built in honor of my own good taste. After the flood, I realized that I could lose it all at any time. Once you get to a certain age, you realize there are records you own that you'll likely never play again before you die. Probably quite a few of them. Whereas when you're in your twenties, you don't think about your time being limited, how many more Mays and Septembers you might get to experience. Realizing this, you become haunted by your own possessions. You realize a certain portion of your used LP collection belonged to dead people with similar tastes as you. And all your records will someday belong to someone else.

Glenn Frey 1948-2016

Singer, songwriter, and actor Glenn Frey passed away on January 18.
Now, I've never been a huge Eagles fan, but how can you not sing along with such tunes as "Take It Easy," "Lyin' Eyes," and "Tequila Sunrise," to name but three. Pictured here is the cover to my Desperado album, the original 1973 LP release from Asylum Records (catalog number SD 5068).
I was motivated to write this blog post because of my relationship, as it were, with one of the Eagles' songs: "Take It Easy," co-written by Glenn Frey and a singer/songwriter by the name of Jackson Browne.
Let's see...when was that...oh, yeah.... I was enrolled in a graduate program in Humanistic Psychology at Camp Sonoma (sorry, you had to be there). For those not privy to the inside student community, "Camp Sonoma" is the local name given to the California State University campus in Rohnert Park, located in beautiful Sonoma County, about an hour or so north of San Francisco.
In one of my classes, taught by George Jackson (who eventually became my graduate advisor), I wrote a paper on existentialism and rock music lyrics. I recall quoting a phrase from the Eagles' song "Take It Easy":

We may lose and we may win though we will never be here again so open up, I'm climbin' in, so take it easy.

So when I learned of Glenn Frey's passing, it brought to mind this song, and this paper, and the Sonoma experience (and it really was an "experience") -- things I haven't thought about in a very long time.
Here's Glenn Frey and his bandmates performing "Take It Easy" in 1977:

"Take It Easy" was originally released on the Eagles' self-titled debut album, but I always preferred Desperado, the band's second studio album; the songs supported a core theme, and were much darker, and thus more to my liking.
Wherever rock musicians go when they pass away, there must be one helluva jam session going on there.
Rest in Peace, Glenn Frey.

ArmadilloCon 25 in 2003

I was sorting through stuff[1] in my study, specifically a couple stacks of convention books (all of which have now been discarded), when I came upon the program book for ArmadilloCon 25, August 8-10, 2003. The Author Guest of Honor was Kage Baker and the Artist Guest of Honor was John Picacio. The program book brought to mind one of the panels I participated in at the con.
As an editor at the time for indie publisher Golden Gryphon Press, I had acquired and edited Kage Baker's first short story collection, Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers , which was published the previous year in time for the World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, California.[2] Also, I had acquired and edited Jeffrey Ford's first short story collection, The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories , published in 2002 as well, which featured cover art by John Picacio[3] -- the first of many covers John did for Golden Gryphon titles. In fact, the ArmadilloCon 25 program book, pictured above, features that very same cover art from The Fantasy Writer's Assistant.
Other Golden Gryphon Press authors were regular ArmadilloCon attendees in those days: Neal Barrett, Jr., Joe R. Lansdale, and Howard Waldrop. And when I learned that Lucius Shepard[4] would also be in attendance, I knew that I had to attend the convention as well.
So I contacted the programming staff and asked that they plan a panel discussion with me as the moderator, and include all the Golden Gryphon Press authors as well as artist John Picacio. They complied with my request, to a degree. The panel, entitled "The Golden Gryphon Experience," held at 11:00 a.m on Saturday, featured, in addition to myself, Kage Baker, Neal Barrett, Jr., Joe R. Lansdale, and John Picacio. Unfortunately, both Lucius Shepard and Howard Waldrop were on a competing panel at the same time entitled "Cool SF/F Movies."
I arrived at the meeting room prior to the start of the panel and taped dust jacket flats along the front edge of the panelists' table, and along the left and right walls: dust jackets for books by the participating authors, and a few dust jackets with John Picacio art.
To tell you the truth, now that it's nearly thirteen years later, I don't really recall any of the specifics of that panel, other than a memory of quite a bit of laughter from the sharing of anecdotes. But I know I had a grand time -- how could I not, sitting alongside the likes of Neal Barrett, Joe Lansdale, Kage Baker, and John Picacio!
Sadly, some of these authors are no longer with us: Kage passed away in January 2010; Neal and Lucius both passed away in 2014, in January and March respectively. So I remember those eight years with Golden Gryphon with equal amounts joy and sadness: joy at having met, and known, and worked with such fine authors and artists, and sadness over those we have now lost, as well as sadness at what could have been regarding Golden Gryphon Press. Excluding reprints, Golden Gryphon published nine books in 2003 -- I did say it was a small indie press! -- but of those nine books, six of them made Locus magazine's recommended reading list. In 2002, five of the six published titles made the recommended reading list, and five out of seven books in 2004. But all that's for another day (though I doubt that day will ever come).
So, cheers to ArmadilloCon, which celebrates its 38th convention in July -- and may you see many, many more such gatherings![5]

---------------Footnotes:
[1] And I mean "stuff" -- my wall-to-wall bookshelves are double-stacked, I have boxes of books piled upon boxes of books on the floor, and here and there where I can find a smidgen of floor space, books simply stacked upon books: that's my workspace!
[2] I wrote about the making of Black Projects, White Knights in a blog post entitled "In the Company of Kage Baker," published here on January 27, 2010. It's the third most read blog post since I began More Red Ink in 2009.
[3] In a blog post entitled "Reflections on the 2000 World Fantasy Convention," published on October 27, 2010, I wrote about my first encounters with both Jeffrey Ford and John Picacio, which led to the publication of The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories with the Picacio cover art.
[4] In my October 20, 2015, blog post "On Lucius Shepard," I wrote about the man and author.
[5] I attended my first ArmadilloCon in 1998 -- ArmadilloCon 10 -- which I wrote a wee bit about in my blog post of August 30, 2010, entitled "Philip K. Dick & Rudy Rucker's Warez."

Editing in Process: The Nightmare Stacks by Charles Stross

American Edition CoverIn my November 11, 2015, blog post I was reading Charles Stross's The Nightmare Stacks , the next volume (#7) in the Laundry Files series, in preparation for actually working on the manuscript. That time has (had) come.
If you are new (seriously?) to the Laundry Files: Officially known as "Q-Division" (at least for now), the Laundry was part of the Strategic Operations Executive (SOE), a World War II British organization responsible for espionage and sabotage in occupied Europe. The Q-Division was a supersecret black group formed to counter Hitler's research and experiments in the occult. At the end of WWII, the SOE was disbanded, but the Q-Division secretly remained intact. The new headquarters was then located above a Chinese Laundry, and thus the nickname. These days, the Laundry's primary objective is to protect the citizens of Her Majesty's Government from incursions from beyond spacetime. But the Laundry must also defend against one who attempts to take over the world (The Jennifer Morgue), the cultlike church who tries to force the Second Coming (The Apocalypse Codex), individuals with V syndrome (The Rhesus Chart), and individuals with superpowers (The Annihilation Score).
Now, as revealed in The Atrocity Archives, the first volume in the series, shortly before the end of the war in Europe, members of the Ahnenerbe-SS used occult measures to open a gateway to a nitrogen-based planet, to which they escaped, to bide their time until they were ready to return to Earth -- and the termination of that return fell upon the Laundry.
In fact, if you look at the graphic above of the American edition of The Nightmare Stacks you'll see a Kettenkrad on the cover -- a German motorized half-track, small enough to be steered like a motorcycle. The Kettenkrad was salvaged from the Ahnenerbe-SS by the Laundry, and rebuilt by Pinky and Brains (readers of the series will recognize this pair of R&D tech geeks from previous volumes), and both Pinky and Brains, and the Kettenkrad, are integral parts of the story in this forthcoming novel, scheduled to be published in June. (And yes, the driver of the Kettenkrad is wearing seventeenth-century cavalry plate, and that is a dragon flying above the building on the cover. But you'll just have to wait for the novel....)
British Edition CoverThrough the first five volumes of the Laundry Files, we've been following agent Bob Howard: officemate, IT geek, and occult mathematician -- and now Eater of Souls. (Volume five, The Apocalypse Codex, being the exception, in which we were also treated to the POVs of external assets Persephone Hazard, aka agent Bashful Incendiary, and Jonathan McTavish, aka agent Johnny Prince.) Volume six was completely from the viewpoint of Dr. Dominique "Mo" O’Brien (aka agent Candid), a professor and combat epistemologist, who just happens to be married to Bob Howard. But this new volume, The Nightmare Stacks, is neither a Bob novel, nor a Mo novel, but rather "a Laundry novel," as the author Charles Stross states in his November 4, 2015, blog post. Rather, the new novel features operative-in-training Alex Schwartz, who was "drafted" by the Laundry "after stumbling upon the algorithm that turned him and his fellow merchant bankers into vampires." (see The Rhesus Chart)
I spent the majority of December working on the manuscript -- and with the start of the new year, my editing was complete, and the marked-up manuscript is now in the hands of the author. I just checked my email, and counted 108 emails (though there could be a few more that I may have simply overlooked) between the two of us as I worked on this project, far fewer than is typical, based on prevous volumes. However, this time, I didn't confer with Charlie on every major content change -- with seven volumes now, I have to hope that I know what I'm doing (!) and will leave the final decisions to the author when he reviews my edits.

You'll want to read the Stross interview on The Nightmare Stacks, courtesy of io9 -- but I suggest you read the version posted on the author's blog: the interview is the same, but it's Charlie's comments and notes, plus the 79 comments at the end (including the author's responses) that are the most revealing about the book.
As I mentioned in my blog post on editing The Annihilation Score, which was published last July, the most difficult task is maintaining consistency from one volume to the next, and with seven volumes of the Laundry Files now, the task certainly isn't getting any easier. In fact, you would be surprised were I to tell you the email discussion Charlie and I had over the Laundry's official name -- Q-Division -- and what that entailed and what it will lead to, most likely in the next novel (volume eight, 2017's The Delirium Brief).
But for the sake of consistency and understanding, let me share a set of words with readers: a geas (plural: geases) is a magical compulsion to obedience. Readers of the Laundry files series will have come upon this word in nearly every volume. However, in The Nightmare Stacks, we encounter a new race, the alfär, or the unseelie, and in their Low Tongue, the word for a magical compulsion to obedience is also geas, but the plural form is geasa. Something to keep in mind when you read the novel...You never know when this kind of trivia may prove useful!
The Nightmare Stacks is forthcoming from Ace in the U.S. and Orbit in the U.K. and is currently available for preorder.

Book Received: The Record Store of the Mind by Josh Rosenthal

As a followup to my "different" blog post of December 14 on vinyl, I recently received a copy of Josh Rosenthal's The Record Store of the Mind , published by his own Tompkins Square Press (and record label).
So who is Josh Rosenthal? A budding music geek, he worked at his high school and college radio stations. He eventually landed a gig working for Sony Music (Columbia Records), and his publicity campaign on 1990's Robert Johnson The Complete Recordings is most likely why I learned of RJ and have a copy of this box set in my CD library.
In 2005, Rosenthal launched his own Tompkins Square music label in New York City; and in 2011, he moved the business to San Francisco. Rosenthal is a master of the reissue and a proponent of forgotten musicians (e.g. country music legend Charlie Louvin), bringing them back into the studio to record new music.
Now, in celebration of Tompkins Square's 10th Anniversary, Rosenthal has released The Record Store of the Mind. At the end of the introduction to the book, he writes...but first, let me set the scene: Rosenthal is with his older daughter Emma at a record store in Campbell, California, as he's rifling through the stacks of records...

Emma asked, "How do you know what you're looking for?" I guess I've spent my whole life figuring that out. It's great that I still can't fully answer her question. In this book, I write about some stuff I've done in and around music over the past thirty years; records that I've found or that found me; and records, people, and live music experiences that have forever changed the way I listen. I hope you'll be inspired.

Rosenthal and Tompkins Square have also created a free/public "Record Store of the Mind" Spotify playlist. Songs range from Ron Davies and Harvey Mandel, to Eric Clapton and Charlie Louvin, to Bill Fey and Essra Mohawk. So whilst reading the book, be sure to cue up the appropriate track!

Here's an excerpt from Joseph Neff's review of The Record Store of the Mind on The Vinyl District (but please be sure to read the entire review):

Given some of the idiosyncratic characters inhabiting record collecting and releasing, Rosenthal's music biz story, peppered as it is with Kate Bush, Psychedelic Furs, and Public Enemy, is pretty refreshing and enhanced by a true music lover's sense of detail...
The book's memoir portions are a treat, but the energy devoted to spotlighting underheard records is even more satisfying; the chapter covering The Youngbloods' Warner Brothers-funded custom imprint Raccoon Records provides major insight into a true bygone era and justifies The Record Store of the Mind's purchase price all by its lonesome. And the lengthy list of old-time releases is about as handy a resource for the upstart and veteran collector as I've yet to stumble across.
The Record Store of the Mind may seem a modest endeavor, but Josh Rosenthal furthers the eternal discussion with class and solid prose. Additionally, he pulls-off an impressive trick, casually dishing a wealth of knowledge in a manner that's non-intimidating to information-thirsty novices while also retaining appeal for more weathered record hunters. In short, it'll make a worthy addition to one's music-related bookshelf (or for that matter, a fine gift), holding enough recommendations in its pages to insure frequent consultations.

~ Joseph Neff, The Vinyl District

"Josh Rosenthal is a record man's record man. He is also a musician's record man. He is in the line of Samuel Charters and Harry Smith. In this age where we have access to everything and know the value of nothing, musicians need people like Josh to hear them when no one else can."~ T Bone Burnett