Thoughts While Painting the Ceiling

There comes a time in every man's life when he must paint a ceiling. This is not my favorite kind of painting to do, especially at my age. But I accepted the challenge, moved all the stuff out of the dining room (except for the breakfront, which is just too big) and had at it. I'm done now, after one full coat and one partial one to cover up a few spots I missed.

If you've never painted a ceiling, let me congratulate you. It's arduous, even for such a small room as the one in which we dine. But It's done now, and with any luck I won't have to paint any more ceilings in this life.

More important that the dining room ceiling is the news that my wife, Grace Marcus, is going to have her first novel published later this year. The book is titled Available Light, and the publisher is Family of Light, which sounds religious but isn't. Grace has published shorter works before, including a few in collaboration with me. She's looking forward to having her book published, as am I.

She was not looking forward to filling out the Author's Information info requested by her publisher. But I assisted with that task, and we got it done.

In other news, I've been asked by William Breiding to do a review of Astounding, Alec Nevala-Lee's excellent study of the Golden Age of SF and John W. Campbell's influence on it for Portable Storage 6. I read the book last year but I don't mind re-reading it, as it's a damn good read.

Something that comes to mind when thinking about the review is the fact that when I was young and beginning to write, back in the 1960s, just about all the "greats" of science fiction were still alive. Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, LeGuin, et al. More to the point, it was a time when, if you were at all interested in the field, you had probably at least heard of earlier practitioners, like Dr. David Keller, Doc Smith, Ross Rocklynne, and so on. There had even been a number of books about sf art published, so one could get a good grasp of that aspect of the pulps.

Even many well-known fans were alive, such as Harry Warner, Jr., Sam Moskowitz, etc. I never met Harry, but in the 70s, after selling my first few pieces of fiction, joining SFWA, and getting involved with sf fandom through conventions and fanzines, I did meet SaM, among other fans. Someone with interest could more or less easily know pretty much all there was to know about the field, and meet some of the most important practitioners.

That's not true anymore. Young writers now might not even know who Hal Clement, for example, was, or Keith Laumer.

I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, and I'm sure than any young writer with any degree of interest in the field can still pretty easily tease out its history... but Nevala-Lee's book might hold no appeal at all for many of them.

Whereas for an old guy like me, who devoured each issue of Campbell's Analog, not to mention Amazing, Fantastic, Galaxy and the others, and who has a good sense of the continuity of the genre all the way back to Gernsback and much further back before the pulps came along and science fiction didn't really have a home -- or even a name -- of its own, the book is something of a treasure trove as well as a piece of nostalgia.

Of course, given social media and the internet, it can be even easier than ever, in some cases, to communicate with writers. David Gerrold, for example, is very active on Facebook. But there are also writers who don't go there, who are barely known to today's readers. Last year I was at MystiCon in Virginia, where the Guest of Honor was Larry Niven. I saw him briefly one afternoon when he was sitting at a table, likely waiting for folks to queue up for him to sign one of his books for them. No one was paying him any mind, and I felt sorry for him.

Well, I've nattered on long enough, because I'm tired after all that painting. But I did want to mention Portable Storage and my wife's upcoming novel. I'm also going to do a bit of art for PS, including a header for a piece by Fred Lerner, who was one of the first fans I met way back when, and whom I have not seen in about 50 years. So that will be fun.

Oh -- and I'm within 5K words of finishing my latest ghostwritten paranormal cozy mystery. Other tasks await after that, including a book of my own. But for now, this post is done.

Well, except for this painting, which dates from about 2004. These are some of the buildings at the Prallsville Mill in Stockton, NY, on the Delaware River. Oil on board.