My Life and Times, part 6: My passion for books.

Life is all about passion. Now I realize some of you, upon seeing that word, immediately think of those scenes in movies where two people notice each other from across a room, make glowing eye contact, and then proceed to spend the rest of the movie trying to make babies while hoping desperately that they don’t make a baby.

That’s not the type of passion I mean. Passion is the difference between those people who are bored much of the time, having no activity which really gives their life any joy, and those people who are always filled with joy because they have a passion for something. Such as:

• a passion for art, either as an artist or a connoisseur of art;
• a passion for music, either as a listener or as a musician;
• a passion for science, either as a researcher or as a student of science;
• a passion for food, either as a chef or as a gourmet;
• a passion for sports, either as a participant or as a spectator;
• a passion for books, either as a writer or as a reader;

Or, in all the cases above, as a combination of active and passive participant in some endeavor. For me, it is books. I cannot possibly imagine either my past life or my current life without books, both reading them and writing them. Here are a few of my random memories involving reading or writing.

• Almost as soon as I discovered comic books at the age of 9 years old, I began writing and drawing my own comics. Fortunately, they were too bad to save and I no longer have them;
• As soon as I had a driver’s license, I would drive from Cliffside Park all the way to Hackensack which had the best bookstore in the area where I bought my earliest science fiction novels, such as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars books (those of the ill-fated box I discussed previously);
• Almost as soon as I started reading Galaxy Magazine as a teenager, I started writing my own magazine entitled Nebula Magazine. How’s that for blatant plagiarism, haha?
• In the mid 1960s, I fell in love with “New Wave” science fiction, which combined the best of the past (sense of wonder, future speculations, taut plotting) with literary aspirations. Writers such as Roger Zelazny, Robert Silverberg and Samuel R. Delany were the people I admired most as a youth;
• When we moved to Whippany, I began traveling every week to the nearest mall having a bookstore. First it was Willowbrook in Wayne. Then Livingston Mall. Finally Rockaway Mall. My science fiction collection grew and grew;
• After discovering science fiction fandom, I started my own fanzine called Gradient which contained writing by me and my talented cousin Rita. It lasted on-and-off for twenty years, eventually giving way to my perzine (personal zine) Visions of Paradise which is now up to issue #160 and posted monthly;
• In college I decided that what I really wanted to do was write science fiction professionally. Upon graduation I devoted myself to that goal, spending six months writing my first novel. Two years later I attended Clarion West (a six-week speculative writers’ workshop), then spent every free minute for the next 15 years writing fiction, all to no avail;
• In the 1970s I discovered another group of science fiction writers as talented as the New Wavers of the 1960s: Michael Bishop, John Varley, C.J. Cherryh, George R.R. Martin. I aimed my own writing at their high level, which I did not realize until several decades later was way too high a level for my meager talents, and that I would have been better off emulating lesser journeymen writers instead;
• In the mid-1980s, tired of having no contact with fellow sf fans at all, I joined an amateur press association where I traded Visions of Paradise with dozens of other fans. That cut my writing time drastically, but the interaction with other people passionate about science fiction was a worthwhile trade-off;
• In the 1990s I gave up reading science fiction for over a year for various reasons, but during that year I discovered how truly exciting historical fiction could be, providing many of the same thrills as science fiction. Andrea Barrett’s stories about passionate scientists. Iain Pears’ thought-provoking historical mysteries. Elmer Kelton’s studies of frontiersmen;
• Considering how much I loved my students, I might never have retired were it not for the opportunity to write science fiction full-time. So long as I do not think about the Math Lab too frequently, I am very happy sitting at my computer most of the day.

Enough. By now you either stopped reading or are totally bored, lol.