One of the first print magazines I ever owned was a copy of Amazing Stories from September 1981; it belonged to my oldest brother (I might've mentioned one or both of them to you by name a long time ago; they're about four years apart in age, I'm twenty years younger than our middle brother) and for a reason he couldn't put a finger on logically at the time, bought it for me and put the book in a place I trusted to and knew I’d not mind it being, then encouraged me to read it when it struck any fancy to have me grok a look.

By the time I turned four late in 1981, my English language comprehension was good enough that I understood the words but the more subtly reckoned tonality took me a lot longer. The resulting conclusions of the cruxii below, I grokked from three articles therein- and collectively, several of the fan letters bearing the same implied offense-response to how popular TV homage book 'awful drosses' were- mostly referring to late-1970's Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars 'A New Hope' (1977) and of course Trek got tossed in there- and 'what the hell is wrong with people who can't be sufficed with the same niche, specific extremities my hedonism embraces, and instead enjoy popular, massproduced sci-fi?'

Tacking on, ironically, the implication if not barefaced statement, "Why do I deserve to go out of business because I refuse to sell 'cheap dreams' my custom somehow prefers?" I mean, were they predreaming 1995's Strange Days fourteen years in advance, shorn of a righteously good soundtrack to bring home and fulcrum-break the fragile spine of fearful, subtle silence?

The first (The Rejects/Les Jetons, short story): Harlan Ellison is a great writer, but he was a massive asshole who either misunderstood the fact or felt the need to adhere to a role imposed upon him, a title that was the gaol attached to his fame before he understood the spell would break if he chose to be kind, even if that was what he wanted. And if he had the choice, was strong enough to break that spell to be himself, he would have.

The conclusion: he was a small man who had a task, a talent and thought he understood the rules, but he ignored the biggest one: he still could choose, and he decided his fame was better than not being remembered as a sad little shit with a big mouth, and a bestseller’s strap-on. The lesson: It’s worth being a nobody to the world who only know your face, maybe your name, and are instead a good human being bearing kindness you share if you can be a decent person to the people who’ll honestly tell you so or not.

The second (Opinion, Robert Silverberg): I could barely read this particular ‘opinion piece’ without wanting to dress the man down if he’s in the crowd and I’m ever on the dais for a book I write and people like because the genuinely do, for the kind of gall he tosses out. The whole thesis was bound to the profound excuse that because it can be classed as opinion, there’s no hill to die on so no apparent risk to himself.

Defending his so-called peers that somehow are alone of valid worth as authors because they bear the top-tier of science-fiction awards; then going into a more worthy, bitter diatribe about the very real concern of paid accolades, authors renting out their names voluntarily to be printed on the covers of books that have no stories within the magazine or anthology written or penned by any of them.

(This I understand did occur, but it was all but presented like a Schrodinger’s snowfield to set the tone less adversarially; I do this in my own writing but I sure as Sheol won’t if I’m trying to make a cogent point, factual context wherein honesty in profession and mutually agreed understanding is extremely important.)

The conclusion: When the hell did you even write a novel or bear a name on an anthology cover with a story within between 1978 and 2023, you pompous little Danton, sans a Marshall Clue-in, and what was it called, and why should I care? I like how much he presumes a total stranger would know that about his novelty, even if they weren’t remotely patient. It must be nice to live your life on a post-primate speedbump and assume everyone thinks your name means something if they need to find your work organically, and not because of a book club misshipment that can’t be sent back.

The third: Arthur C. Clarke, of all people, proudly bleating ‘you have just signed the first writ of declaration of the United States of Earth!’ I mean, was he at someone’s table playing a character from a book he wrote? No! The man was at a genuine futurist’s collective, planning for the world to come idealized.

I actually believed in the man, felt a strange, conclusive connection by reckoning in 2000, when he appeared at Toronto Trek (later Polaris, now long since bankrupt and defunct) by video from his secluded home on an island off of the Indian coast, shortly before or after his death and now I wish I had not. The Sentinel inspired me, not because it was born in the barren brightness of pessimism but because I could work with that, turn the heel of Pyrrhus to the steel of Cadmus. Presumption geared to a single Elder Race who cared but had shitty quality control and a habit of waste, could ignore there being more than one in a properly relatavistic context. It was not, to me anyway, meant as imposition of reality in advance but a reality play, a tragedy of projection thru the medium of the reader’s parallel assumption.

Honestly, I’d be happy to ask Boo to shoot Arthur See Dent the PC in the face with her symlinked combat shotgun at Luna Tuesday’s and I’m sure Ed would’ve let me and her get away with it, being that she’s smarter than I am and a better shot by far. That was my second table, with Ed at the GM’s shield in 1995 at Ad Astra. Besides, I know who eats the greens in our relationship, and she saved my Dad’s soul; I’m sure I once told you the tale of The Dudder (Milk Dud), but maybe not the one she inspired in the tale of The Wizard of Willowdale, thanks to her Shieldmate, the Ranger of Riverdale. (I’ll show you the tattoo design sometime, if I can find it. I think my high school Laurentian coloured pencil set has the indigo stylus with a little blue blended in still in the sleevebox.)

In the end, I kept the magazine, and it’s on my shelf. I doubt I’ve ever told Jenora how this shaped her early tutoring me when it came to learning my trade, or what came of it in detail. The moral of the molar removal intent therein: Don’t open your mouth as an author if you won’t or can’t do your fucking job, stick to the task and not think your laurels are their own proof. A good title means nothing if you don’t have a book behind it, and that book can be about anything if it means something to you and the people who will find it.

Codicil: The medium is as important as the message, but it would really help if you’d write the bloody thing down and stop whining that we can’t read your mind, even if we do have psychic powers. I mean, does it matter if we do or not, if we can clearly hear you being an ass and thinking you’re impressing profundity?

I impress that this is not aimed at or intended to burden you, Taral; not remotely so. I think I agree with you in my own reckon, hence my response, but if I’ve misjudged the context I’ll at least thank you for reading down this far, if you've allowed us both that.

-2Paw.

It's a little hard to see what you're driving at. That a few writers see a little full of themselves, perhaps? That's pretty common, from my experience, but maybe you *have* to think you are a little special ... otherwise why would you spend your spare time writing nonsense instead of going bowling instead? Some writers are better at putting a pleasant face on their essential egotistical nature than others, however. I know a few who are aware of their value as writers, yet know perfectly well that they count for little in the grand scheme of things, measured by any standard you can name -- money, power, fame or opportunity. I have some slight inkling into the mind of Harlan Ellison, I think. He appears to be a man driven much by the need to prove himself, physically and intellectually, who was bullied when young for being small, intellectual... and Jewish. Silverberg I really don't know. I only recall one encounter, when he sought to buy a very valuable old fanzine from the 1941 Worldcon, and was too cheap to pay the market value, offering to trade some first editions of his later books (like Gilgamesh) that I had no interest in. I wasn't impressed considering he was supposed to be one of the most successful SF writers in the field. Clarke? He was known by his own friends as "Ego C. Clarke," which may give you some idea. But I don't know much about him. He was very secretive in his private life, and remained classically "in the closet."

You're right about my having crammed in and thru the length and wordiness, and I appreciate your patience with me, Taral. It's a limit I still fight off and frankly, after the events I've had to allow being slammed into place in the immediate past I'm not all that well mentally, or at least I can't focus predictably. It'll be easier to get into detail about what's happened and why if you're interested in a more reasonably-phrased tale once I've gotten my head on straight again, but that may not be for a long while. What's happened is already leaving me in an endstate where I'm not wholly who I was and the mutancy I've had to accept may make more changes to my psychic formatting before the worst is over.

I'm okay and I'm not physically in danger, from myself or anyone else, and my ability to reckon clarity and sustained clearsight is the worst and best part of it because I know for a fact what I'm taking in is real, it is happening.

Suffice it to say my ability to write is still reliable but I can't predict when or if a day's going to pop up that I can't function; it's not predictable aside from the established symptomatic limits of the negative impact and that I can expect it now and then; that's about it. But I can write and draw a lot and if anything, knowing that I can do my creative work and contribute in a way that means something to me is that much more of a help right now.

I did know that about Ellison, that he often got the crap kicked out of him growing up- I thought I'd understood he or his ancestry was Jewish but I honestly didn't know it for a fact until now- and what I knew of his tale, a man who came across as brash, morally righteous (and not unreasonably so; he was not an ass just for the sake of it until by repute his filters started to fail when he was dying) but there were plenty of people close to him that told the tale of Harlan being conflicted, raging inside and disturbed by the changes he saw in himself. I mean I never knew the man, and can't assume beyond surface observation and reported anecdote, but going back to when he was more active as an author and not close to the end of his life, he was definitely a moral prig if not a full on Assholion Titan, but it was rare I sensed him come across as wrathful and nasty, more than being angry and cold, when not in rage.

I could tell there was conflict there, a struggle behind his eyes, not that anyone at all doesn't face that sometimes. But living there because you must or choose to for that long can't not affect you, I know. He'd been hurt- maybe his dreams had met injury too, who knows?- so I tried to observe and reckon, more than anything, do it clearly and kindly. Sometimes listening kindly is the only thing you can do for someone who's been hurt so badly they can't trust those vault walls to come down.

I don't think pain should measure a person, or that it should be what defines them at the core, but it will affect them. I admit what's happened to me therein is more than a little disturbing, feeling disturbed at the visible shivers I see, the changes that are apparent. I don't know if I'll be very happy being the person I'll be if nothing can merit repair psychologically once my body's in better shape.

To wit, the contextual fistbump I meant to put to your drawing started out with my thinking of that 1981 sci-fi print magazine I own a copy of, and your description of the commissioning agent you worked with: "....(a) magazine was for yuppies desperate to find out how to live forever, or at least an entire century." If only living forever meant a body would be happy while they lived it, didn't die a little inside or maybe didn't feel alive at all. Recognizing a difference in you that you can't explain easily or push away, like you can't remove an innate talent any more than organic body parts are modular client-end by design just yet, can kill you in slowspeed, like poison on a mercury delay line. It may not matter by the time you realize immortality is nothing more than a curse you can't escape or abrogate.

-2Paw.

Heinlein was the writer who seemed most obsessed with his own mortality, and invented more than one fictional character who was basically himself, made immortal and powerful, either as a character, or through infinite alternate realities. Even as a young man, he had a brush with death through tuberculosis, resulting in his discharge from the Navy just before WWII. (For all his bluster about the duty to serve in the armed forces, he worked as an minor engineer for the Navy during the war.) Even before his service in the Navy, he was a sucker for all sorts of scams -- from eye exercises to black magic, to Dianetics to vegetarianism ... all to help him live to 120!

One of the only gifts my mother ever bought me that was specific to my interests in science-fiction was a modern pressing of Robert Heinlein's 'Stranger In A Strange Land', the story of a good man who thought himself unhuman, come and fallen to Earth and tried his best to meet that purpose, but in the end never gave up because he understood that giving up was the only death he could not afford.

It was a gift she gave me on my birthday in 2006, the year my father died; we were very close and my mother knew it. He had even worse trouble trusting than I did, but I presumed it was so much worse because until he married, and then found the company of his three sons, he never had anybody he felt close to, could relate to. He made sure in the best way he could that in my case, I did.

My mother was of the first generation of children to be inoculated with the Salk Polio v.1 vaccine in the 1950s, and while she had the disease and recovered- no reverse-pressure iron lung or closing on loss of her own life, but a mild neuropathy, dulling or lack of nervous tactile feedback in the extremities that's affected her all her life- she was quite literally the only child of ten years' age in a conveyor-belt observation room of children her age who died by the hundreds while she watched, totally aware of what was happening in that isolation ward while she lived there for three years in quarantine.

The only fashion in which I can attempt to understand how she got through that more-or-less in one piece inside is knowing the metapercussive steamhammer I endured over and over in my life, and while broken more times than I can count I never gave up on the people I knew and cared for, at least once I could walk on my own again. Some things you can't unsee but others you're never going to understand, and that might in its own way be a mercy.

-2Paw.

Thank you for uploading all those old but wonderful works

What WAS the first professionally paid for and published piece of mine? I should dig it up. 'Course, that was almost half a century ago....

"Beowulf" maybe?

Har de Har Har. You ain't no spring chicken yourself, bub!

I am very sure the comic I'm minding wasn't the first you had published, Kjartan, as you've been active as an artist a lot longer than I have but I think the very first print comic I ever saw of yours when it was fresh on the stands was out of MU Press or maybe Antarctic, back in the early 1990s.

I feel certain it was part of The Mink's origin arc, involving the pseudodemonic wizard (Carneczki? Skorzeny? Not sure right now.) who forced Mink to get him out of his astral gaol, but retained Paddy in his vigilante guise as backup, because it took quite specifically modern tech (and the Holy-Shite Squirrel Grenade) that the old bean didn't expect to knock him on his butt and off the playing field of the local grid.

That was the one I saw of yours earliest on, though, and am very sure that was not your first printed work.

-2Paw.

Nope. I had a comic-strip in a local paper when I was 13 and 14 (1977, '78) called "Peter and the Robot". But I'm sure there's something I got published before even that.

"We are not alone, is not caution, but affirmation of purpose."

"We already know the answer, because we understand the astronomical
odds we'd ever exist in the first place. That the dust of the earth became
brachiate life, that we gained the gift of knowing the sun wasn't just warm
and lifegiving, but a part of what we are, and it knew itself as no better or
worse than us."

"It just has a longer purse and stretch of spacetime duration, that's all.
You're an engineer, and I know you know that physics is both ex-static
and hard as stone, like a starcraft's reactive hull meshed with forcefield
support grids."

"Those rules are mutable and negotiable, under the right conditions; broken
down to the extremity of elementary quanta, they're really not rules at all,
agreement to agree rather than disagree, for sake of information exchange."

"Like good neighours, 'Lene. You are my mother, in all the right ways. You've
helped me remember so much that I didn't think I knew."

"And you set me free from Ghost and let me be a lioness again, Ka'tch'Ian.
You told her to leave me alone and give us a moment, and then she decided
your paws needed me more than her talons did."

"Fate?"

"Kismet. Same thing, different name, like your mother and I. We're
not the same person but in all the right ways we are, if I may beg your
pardon, my mane."

"Well, I'm marrying you in three months, so I admit that helps our
breadth of specifics."

"Have you picked the words?"

"What?"

"The Ode."

"Uh....Rea; no. No, I think I know what they are. I haven't scratched
them down yet. You want to see when I do?"

"Not until you tell me them, no sooner, no later. That's when you'll
tell me."

"Fair enough."

-2Paw

A cold signal out in the speed of a void; a purposed grain of sand