Writers of the Future XXI
1. What It Is and How It Happened
L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future Contest is the most important contest for aspiring authors of speculative fiction. Only new writers need apply, as only a few professional publications are required for a writer to lose eligibility. There's no fee to enter the contest, and with four judging quarters each year there's plenty of chance to throw a tale into the ring. No surprise, then, that the number of entries is rather large. The administrators are reluctant to give out numbers, but word on the street is that the number of entries each year might push the 20,000 mark.
I entered on a lark.
For a couple of months I'd been sending around a few of my short stories to the Big Names in the business: places like Scifiction, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov's, Analog, and so forth. Nothing urgent, nothing regular, just every now and then sticking something in the mail. I'd managed to get one sale, to an up-and-coming magazine called Black Gate. A huge thrill. My goal had only ever been to see something — anything — of mine in print. So my submissions to other publications trickled down even further. Then I came across a reference to this contest that had no entry fee and had thousands of dollars in prizes. No dummy, I started looking over the rules. It turns out that the contest allows some fairly long short stories to be entered. And since I figured that long stories are a harder sell than short ones, I printed out one of my longer ones and shipped it off.
Time passed.
Then I got a call around dinner time from Los Angeles, a call notifying me that I was a finalist. That was pretty darn swell.
Time passed.
Then I got one of those "are you sitting down" calls, again from LA. I was put on speakerphone. And this time it was to tell me that I'd won third place in the third quarter of the contest. They told me I had an "invitation" to a week of workshops and a tux-required awards ceremony the following August. I told them that I'd need to see how the finances were at that time since airfare to California ain't cheap. There was a spot of silence on the other end of the line, and then someone stammered, "No, it's an invitation. As in we pay for the flight and the hotel."
"Oh," I said, surprised. "I thought it was an invitation. As in 'Bring Your Own Beer.'"
2. The Workshops
It turns out that the workshops and awards were moved from LA to Seattle at the last minute. I thought twice about going — life is pretty busy here — but eventually decided that it might be some fun. And since I'd never had any creative writing instruction, or met many creative writers, I figured I might learn something, too.
The flight from Rochester to Pittsburgh was dreadful. I was in the last seat on a two-prop puddlejumper, which is no place to be when the tail of the plane is kicking like a retarded mule. And I don't like planes anyway.
Had a good strawberry milkshake in the airport. That was nice. But not very interesting. Sorry to trouble you with it.
The flight from Pittsburgh to Seattle, though: that was interesting. I had to pick my seats when I checked in at Rochester, and somehow I had managed to pick a seat right in front of one of the other winners, a nice chap named Scott Roberts. I don't know what the odds on that are, but they can't be high. It turns out he took second place in my quarter. But I liked him anyway.
Scott and I were met at the airport by Elise Toth, a charming young lass who works for the contest. It was the first time in my life that one of those people holding the signs was holding it for me. We jumped into a rig where we found another contest winner, Scott Stanley, already in place. He only had to fly in from Oregon, the bastard.
We drove off for our hotel, the Marriott SpringHill Suites, which is fairly swanky compared to Motel 6. Scott and I were both exhausted, since it was after midnight for us on Eastern Time, but they had actually scheduled a get together for the first night. So we dropped off our bags and then hustled over to another hotel where everyone else was waiting for us to take part in a meet-and-greet that lasted about an hour, I'd guess. I hope I didn't look too much like a zombie, as it was my first chance to meet Tim Powers and K.D. Wentworth, our two instructors for the week of workshops — and fantastic writers in their own rights. Nice folks, both of them. We found out at that point that a production company was making a documentary about the contest. So there were folks with cameras running around, filming over and under and around our elbows. Crazy.
We were given homework for the night, which meant I was up until really late Eastern Time, but then, at last, I fell into a blissful sleep.
The next morning we were picked up at 9am for the ride to the Seattle Public Library, which was open only to us for the morning. It's a huge complex, quite futuristic. Tim and K.D. expounded on various topics, from outlining to plot devices. It was awesome. We took an hour for lunch but were otherwise in workshops all day. It was amazing to learn so much in such a short period of time. We were getting so much information about becoming a professional writer that it was all I could do to keep up.
Towards the end of the day we were told that one of our tasks during the week would be to write a short story, from start to finish, in twenty-four hours. Quite a shock to folks like me who only write on occasion when the "muse" overtakes us and we ain't got nothin' else to do. For this story we would have three elements to jumpstart our thinking: an object, an interview, and some research. My object, provided that first day, was a pocket pack of Kleenex. Fifteen 2-ply tissues. In a plastic wrapper adorned with purple flowers and green leaves. I stared at it for a long time, with not much on my mind. Despair began to creep into my world.
Naturally, the camera crew decided that my object was particularly "great." So they pulled me aside for a one-on-one interview to talk about the contest and the workshops. And Kleenex.
Information continued to pour in the next day. But around eleven in the morning Tim and K.D. announced that the time had come for us to go forth into the streets of Seattle to seek out total strangers and find out what their stories were. So I wandered down to the waterfront. Met a guy with a strange skin condition. Met another who, just a few minutes earlier, had been fired from his job on a construction crew. Both of these folks began to make interesting connections in my mind with that silly Kleenex pack.
Back at the library, we were told how to set up a booksigning and how to handle the media during an interview. Too late for me, damnit!
The next day, we were set free in the library to gather the third element for our 24-hour stories: research. If we had something in mind from our object and interview, we could do research on it. Otherwise, one was supposed to roam the stacks and pull random books that looked interesting. You know, just to get the synapses firing.
Speaking of synapses, I had started thinking about a guy who was going to lose his job if he didn't go into therapy (there's that Kleenex). But what could such a fellow be going through that was suitable for a speculative fiction tale? Mortality, I decided. He was afraid of dying. And he decides, in therapy, that he'll grab the bull by the horns and just beat death once and for all. He'll become immortal. By replacing his body, piece by piece, with robotics; and then his brain, neuron by neuron, with a pulsing electrical grid. Brilliant, I thought. Digitizing himself, really. A good Science Fiction idea. So I pulled down stacks of books on brains and prostheses and cyborgs and robotics and went to town. Got a ton of notes.
Didn't have a story. A story idea, sure. But not a story. When Tim and K.D. gathered us up and started the 24-hour clock, I had no plot. No conflict. Just an idea.
I was sure I saw crows circling the Marriott.
I tried to write it. Got a few pages down. But without conflict it was crap. So I paced a bit. And then I thought about one of the details I'd found in my research that morning. About how our brains lose the ability to understand certain phonemes (types of sound) because the language we are learning doesn't use them. Increasing mental capability means the reduction of mental potential. There's a story in that, I decided. I'd also come across a passage about language that I thought was so nifty that I wrote it down verbatim:
More than half the world's population speaks one of the following five languages: Chinese, English, Spanish, Russian, and Hindi. Ninety-five percent of the world's population speak the one hundred most common languages. At the other end of the scale, fewer than a thousand people speak about a third of the world's languages. In Ethiopia, for example, the Ongota language is spoken by nineteen people, while there are only six speakers of Elmolo. A few years ago [1995?], the last two people who spoke Gafat died after a linguist brought them out of the jungle into the highlands, where they caught deadly colds. The Aore language is spoken by a single inhabitant of the Pacific island-nation of Vanuatu. (Manfred Spitzer, The Mind Within the Net, 1999, p. 211)
This it got me to thinking — why, I have no idea — about the medieval legend of the Wandering Jew, a man who struck Jesus on the road to Calvary and was cursed by him (turn the other cheek, eh?) to walk the earth until the end of days. What if, I wondered, the wandering Jew was the last person speaking Hebrew? What if he was the last person speaking any language other than English? For reasons that also remain unclear to me, thinking about this recalled to my mind a scene that had struck me many years ago. I had been reading Shakespeare's Macbeth, and in one of her most famous speeches Lady Macbeth declares that the "raven himself is hoarse" (it's in Act I, scene 5, I think). A great little image, and it had made me think of a woman named Tabitha Hoarse Raven, who is standing on the edge of Acoma mesa, with the pueblo behind her, calling to Father Thunder. Anyway, this scene came back to me in the Marriott. So I began a story about Tabitha, who is the last speaker of Keresan on Earth. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I finished up my story with an hour or so to spare. Printed it out. Headed back to the library.
And who should be waiting for these bleary-eyed souls? Why Anne McCaffrey and Sean Williams, of course. Great folks, who gave great talks. I felt a particular affinity to Sean since he, too, had once been a third place finisher in the contest. And now he's Big Time.
Just before we left the library we were given photocopies of everyone else's 24-hour tales. Three were selected to be critiqued by the group. Mine was not among them, which was sad. I really wanted the experience of sitting and listening to people critique my tale.
The next morning we critiqued the three stories. I'd read those three and three others. And my impression was one of awe. We were a damn fine group of writers. Especially given the time restraints we were under.
At around one o'clock we went to the lobby of the Hotel Monaco (swankier than the Marriott and home to the judges), where we were given the chance to meet the winners of L. Ron Hubbard's Illustrators of the Future Contest. They had each been given the task of illustrating one of the winning stories. The illustrations were matted and framed, hanging up in the lobby. We had to find our own, then meet the illustrator. It was wild. Especially with all the videocameras and flashes going off.
Unfortunately, Uncle W and the crack staff of Homeland Security had denied the visa for my illustrator, a young woman from the Ukraine named Olga Madiar. We all know the terror that an illustrator can cause with a pen. It was amazing to see the picture, though. To get a glimpse into the images that my story put into another person's mind.
We got to keep the pictures.
Showing off Olga Madiar's illustration.
Back at the library we had a parade of guests talk to us: Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta, Charles Brown, Yoji Kondo, Jerry Pournelle, Robert Sawyer, Jay Lake. It was tiring and astonishing all at once. That evening we were served a big barbeque outside of Fisherman's Restaurant, which is on a pier sticking out into the sound. I was invited over to eat dinner with Brian Herbert (Frank's son and quite an author himself) and Mr. Magic Realism, Bruce Taylor. Later I talked with William McGorry, the publisher of Publisher's Weekly. And I chatted up Kevin Anderson, who lives in Colorado and has climbed all the fourteeners. And Larry Niven was just sort of hanging around.
I slept good that night, since the next morning was the Day of the Awarding.
3. The Awards Ceremony
The ceremony took place in the Science Fiction Museum. We were supposed to rehearse the ceremony in the morning, but it was delayed until mid-afternoon. My roommate, the awesome Lon Prater, pointed out that we probably wouldn't get to see the museum during the ceremony, so we decided to kill the morning by going down and touring it ourselves. It was interesting, but I confess that the most fascinating part of it all was the fact that some of the big name author/judges like Rob Sawyer were there, too. At one point I was looking at a display of Science Fiction books and Larry Niven walked up to look at it, too. His book was one of the ones there. It was very surreal.
After rehearsal we hustled back to the hotel and changed into tuxedos (for the boys) and gowns (for the gals). Then there was make-up (I'm not kidding). And then I jumped into a new Hummer H3 that drove us over to the Space Needle for a banquet with the judges.
Things were running late, so we had to rush through the meal. And it sucked that they made us sit together as winners rather than spacing us out through the folks in attendance. But the food was good. And no one barfed out of anxiety.
The ceremony was a blur. There were lots of lights, and lots of cameras, and hundreds of people in the audience. They even had one of those cameras on a boom that can swoop over the audience. Each winner had to give a speech. And then we each got a trophy, which is pretty awesome. I can't recall what I said, really. I recall just being happy that I didn't pass out. There were a lot of pictures afterwards.
Acceptance speech at the ceremony.
We were then ushered upstairs to a big room where the guests were all waiting, along with piles of Volume XXI of the Writers of the Future anthology — the collection of our winning stories, with a nifty cover executed by Frank Frazetta. We sat down at tables. Lines formed. We began to sign our names on books. Until long after midnight.
It was like a dream, really. Authors I'd known only as names on books were coming up, asking for my autograph. Complete strangers were asking me how I'd done it. One lady begged me to look at her work, give her advice. It was, I have little doubt, the high point of my writing career. It's all downhill from here. It has to be. I can't imagine anywhere higher up than that night, with that pen in my hand, scribbling away.
— 25 August 2005
