Let Me Count the Days
By my presumably accurate inventory, this is my thirty-sixth published book. (I am not including different editions of extant titles here, nor such items as Families Are Murder, which collects into an omnibus my two mystery novels written with Michael Bishop and previously published separately.) I think having thirty-six volumes out in the world under one’s name is a fairly impressive accomplishment. (Of course, imagining that those books contain high-quality material could redound even more to one’s credit.)
As writers do when they want to reassure themselves that they have been working hard and not just playing with Facebook all day, I try to parcel out the number of books across my entire career to see just how “productive” I’ve been. But that’s where the trouble starts.
When did my career begin exactly?
I sold my first story in 1977, when I was still in college. Maybe my career began then.
But I did not focus intensely on my writing with the goal of becoming a professional until 1982. Maybe that was the real start of my career.
But I did not manage to break into print again until 1985, when I sold two stories almost simultaneously to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Twilight Zone Magazine. (Thanks, Ed Ferman and Ted Klein!) True career opener?
Hold on though! I did not publish my first book until The Steampunk Trilogy in 1995. Then surely that’s got to be the real start of my career-between-hardcovers.
So depending on which baseline you use—1977, 1982, 1985, or 1995—it took me either 40 or 35 or 32 or 22 years to accumulate my track record of thirty-six volumes, ending with this 2017 instance.
Roughly one book per year at worst, or one-and-three-quarters at best. In either case, this is hardly a patch on such prodigious past masters as Robert Silverberg or Isaac Asimov or the helmsman behind WordFire Press, Kevin J. Anderson. On the other hand, it’s a much more sizable career than those of many other authors I could name, including some true geniuses such as David Bunch, T. J. Bass and E. R. Eddison.
I guess what really counts beyond all these statistics is having something to say, saying it well, and enjoying the creation of the stories that contain your dreams and thoughts and hopes and fears. So long as a writer can summon up those qualities and pleasures, the speed at which he or she produces work hardly matters. I hope that these stories illustrate my own possession of such virtues, and provide plenty of entertainment for any reader kind enough to purchase this collection.
Nonetheless, I want everyone to know that I already have another volume of tales awaiting publication. Number thirty-seven, and beyond!
—Paul Di Filippo
One change in my writing habits these days is that more often than not, I only commence a story when one is requested of me. Getting invited to contribute to various anthologies or magazines is a nice perk of having been around for a while. Editors and peers know your name, know your work, and believe—some of them, anyhow—that you might be able to enhance a project. Of course, the writer has to feel simpatico with the nature of the project, but generally there are very few themes or approaches in science fiction, fantasy, or horror that I cannot get behind.
Judith Dial and Tom Easton conceived of a great gimmick for their Impossible Futures book. If I may quote their invitation:
“Remember the science and technology you thought we’d have by 2010? Personal jet packs, trans-dimensional travel, workable FTL travel, living clothing, etc. Not just the stuff in Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines, but the ideas that made the old science fiction so much fun. Some of those ideas came to be—e.g., communicators (as cell phones) and instant visual communication (as the Internet)—but many have not.”
They suggested some classic tropes, and I chose the “city as enclosed structure or homogenous entity.” But what central principle could I use to organize my polity that had not been used before? What about the aesthetics of the human form?