Although I’m not writing reviews these days, I still take a professional interest in the blurbs that publishers put in books. One thing they often do is run a bunch of quotes from reviewers on the first few pages so that anyone opening the book in a store can get an eyeful of just how well loved the author is. There’s a page like that at the front of the Seam Williams book, Saturn Returns, that I have just started reading. Some of the quotes just have a byline of a newspaper, as the publishers assume that no one will know the names of newspaper staff reviewers. But others are from fellow fiction writers and are of the form “X author of Y”. I was much amused, therefore, to see at the top of the page, “Cheryl Morgan, author of Emerald City.” So, I iz author, as a LOLcat might say. Must put that on my resume.
3 thoughts on “I Iz Author”
Comments are closed.
It’s never too late. All you need to do now is write the novel. Remember why Gene Wolfe wrote “The Death of Doctor Island”!
Remember why Gene Wolfe wrote “The Death of Doctor Islandâ€!
Actually, no, I don’t. Please enlighten me.
(But really my fiction is not up to it. I’d just end up as another statistic on La Gringa’s slush pile.)
In 1970, Nebula voters chose “No Award” in the Short Story category. Isaac Asimov presented that category at the award ceremony. He either disbelieved “No Award” won, or mistakenly skipped to the name of the runner-up on whatever sheet he’d been given to read, because he announced Gene Wolfe’s “The Island of Doctor Death” as the winner. Wolfe was on his way to the podium when someone corrected the mistake, announced nobody won, and he had to go back. A lot of people felt terrible about what had happened to Wolfe. Someone suggested that he only needed to write a story called “The Death of Doctor Island” and he’d be sure to win a Nebula for it. He did and it did.
(Of course, it was a very good story — it’s tempting to omit that fact from the anecdote…)