I have definitely gotten lazy this summer. I spend my mornings working on the computer, and my original intent was to spend most of that time writing fiction. That is what I did for the first three weeks, but the past two weeks I have spent most of my time updating my blogs, writing letters of comment to other zines, and editing VoP. While that is all useful stuff, to me it is all secondary compared to the higher art of writing fiction. After I finish blogging and posting the July issue of VoP either today or tomorrow, I really need to get back to fiction.

The ironic part of all this is that my blogs and magazine have an audience (the latter of more than 100 readers), while my fiction has no audience at all except me. So why do I consider writing fiction more important? I guess it is all subjective. For most of my life writing fiction has been my primary love artistically, which it still is, and the possibility of actually publishing some fiction has been my personal Holy Grail. The fact that I might never actually find the grail in no way takes away from the pleasure and fulfillment of the writing itself. In my opinion, “true” writers are their own primary audience with all their other readers secondary; otherwise they are basically hacks rather than artists

I know, I know, that sounds incredibly self-serving. Another writer who has never published any fiction is disparaging those writers who do. But that is not my intent. Many fiction writers who are very popular commercially are still obviously artists. Consider the following:

Ken Follett makes a living writing fast-paced thrillers, but he spent several years writing a detailed historical epic which required lots of research and was so different form his usual books that he might not have sold a single copy of it. But he loved medieval England so much he wrote Pillars of the Earth for himself and damn the consequences!

Early in his writing career, Michael Chabon was acclaimed as one of the best young “literary” writers, even winning a Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. So what did he do next? He basically abandoned mainstream literature and returned to writing his first love, genre fiction, with novels such as The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, The Final Solution and Gentlemen of the Road. Some members of the snobby wing of literary establishment have given up on Chabon, but he seems happier now than he ever was when he was a “young lion.”

The vast majority of science fiction being published falls into the adventure end of the field, which is probably the easiest type to write successfully. It is also a type of fiction which I do not enjoy either reading or writing. Instead I write “serious” sf in which culture-building and characterization dominate, which is likely the hardest type to write, requiring the most talent. Am I setting myself up for failure with that stubbornness? Probably, but if I am not happy with what I am writing, why the heck would I do it? Artists can exist on many levels, from the Folletts and Chabons on top of the totem poll, to writers like me on the bottom who do what is best for me and consequences be damned!