Quandary
(NOTE: My faithful PowerBook has been in the shop all week for a RAM upgrade and a bigger hard drive, and since that’s where my incredibly temperamental and precariously calibrated scanning software resides, I can’t typecast until I get it back. Poor thing doesn’t even know that Obama is president. It’s gonna be so happy.)
So for the past five years, I’ve been very casually writing a novel that’s set in the 1950s and is an homage to flying saucers, pulp sci-fi, and duck-and-cover paranoia.
So when she was in town to promote Balticon this summer, my favorite science fiction writer, Connie Willis, told the audience that she’s working on her next novel, which will be set in the 1950s and is an homage to flying saucers and duck-and-cover paranoia.
So yesterday at the Baltimore Writers’ Conference, Larry Doyle told the audience that his next novel will be set in a parallel universe in which everything is an homage to the 1950s and pulp sci-fi.
So should I:
1) Try to hurry up and finish my novel so that reviewers can say I’m just another hack who’s trying to hitch a ride on the bandwagon?
2) Let the novel come out in due course so that reviewers can say I’m just another hack who missed the bandwagon?
Go.
Categorised as: Life the Universe and Everything
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Just do your thing at whatever speed you want. There is nothing new under the sun, and it all depends on your cant on it, not just the subject. As a for instance, a few years ago I played a game that featured duck-and-cover paranoia and 50’s kitsch called Destroy All Humans. Right now I am playing a game called Fallout 3 which features duck-and-cover paranoia and 50’s kitsch, but I don’t ever get the two of them mixed up.
Thanks, Mike. I wrote that post while sitting in the bottom of a very deep well of self-loathing, and it shows. I needed your dose of perspective. I think I’m climbing out of the well.
It’s also a testament to the leveling power of typecasting. The effort needed to think, type, scan, resize, upload, and configure a typecast acts as a useful brake on my postings — is what I’m thinking/feeling really worth all the effort I’m about to undertake? That post would have never made it to life as a typecast.