I had a great time, to put it simply.

This was my first Worldcon in eleven years, but many times it felt as if I had been there every year. Lots of new faces and even more old friends.

As for what happened?  Well, it is far too much to detail out in one post, especially as tired as I still am. But let me do a few general details now and some later.

Worldcon this year was spread out over most of downtown Denver, with the dealer’s room and signings upstairs in the very back of the convention center. Someone said it was about a third of a mile from the front of the convention center to the door into the dealer’s room. I can believe that. And it was another half mile or more from the front of the convention center to where the party hotel and some programming was. One fine afternoon, Kris and I had a signing until 5:30 near the dealer’s room and then Kris was scheduled to be at the Sidewise Awards at 5:30 in the party hotel. We are from sea level, so that hike at near run speed was tough.

But leaving the signing a little early, we were not very late getting there and Kris won that award for her story Recovering Apollo 8. She got second for the same story in the Hugo Awards the next evening.

I’ll go on at some length in another post about the value and lack of value for a writer of attending a convention like this one. But for the moment I just wanted to say that I am back, I had a blast, and I enjoyed seeing everyone.

Cheers, Dean

A number of months back I talked about how I came into professional fiction writing, the short story per week and such. But Laura asked a question after my last post that I figured might be helpful to talk about. In so many words, the question is simply “Did I always write in this same push/rest style?”

Nope. Along the way I’ve tried just about every work method there is. Every one. And I still lust after being more of a regular writer. And I really lust after writing fiction like a day job, eight hours a day, five days a week. I have not managed to do that for any length of time yet, mostly because I’m too lazy. But I keep thinking about it. <g>

So let me back up and talk a moment about how I wrote my first five novels. The first one I mentioned before was written on a typewriter, ten pages per day, thirty days, very rough draft, without much use of white-out. I had forced myself to do it that way because up to that point I had started a half dozen novels and finished none. The time was winter/early spring of 1985. For four years I had been pounding out a short story per week. So that was my first attempt at very consistent writing and it worked.

Second novel was started shortly after the first one and done the same way. Both were destroyed and lost in a house fire just as I was finishing the second novel in early May of 1985. I have no memory of those two books, to be honest, more than likely because they were bad, and partially from the loss aspects of not wanting to think about them.

So, time passed. Remember, during all this, I was working jobs to keep rent paid and all that. I was starting to sell short stories, but the money was always just found money to me. So after the fire, one and a half years passed until I got a letter from an editor at Bantam books asking me if I had a novel. She had seen a couple of my stories in Night Cry Magazine, the little horror sister of Twilight Zone Magazine. She had liked my stories and hoped I was marketing a novel.

Now I had no ideas that letters like that existed. Trust me, that was a very good day.

In a snail mail letter back I said, “Sure, I got one.”

A complete lie.

I went to work, pounding on my new computer as fast as I could, in pure panic mode.

“Send me the first three chapters and a proposal,” she said in a follow up letter one week later. I sent her the first three chapters, freshly off the dot matrix printer, and a suckie outline that next week. (Thank heaven’s I had been following Heinlein’s Rules up to that point and could do just that.)

Then, I went back to work, writing as fast as I could, which during those days was not very fast it seems. The fear of an editor actually reading the book slowed me down something awful and two months passed with me writing, or trying to write, and driving Kris and Nina nuts until the editor asked for the entire book. No consistency at all. None.

One month later I managed to release the book off to the editor. Winter 1987. Entire process just under four months of stop/start/stop/start/panic.

She bounced it, but in the mean time, I had another editor I met at a convention really excited to see it and he bought it in May of 1987 and the book came out of Warner. So book #3 was my first published book.

Now, the week after I mailed the book to the first editor, I was so angry at myself for taking four very long months, I decided to write another novel quickly. I took a week off of work and sat down and typed, hard, fast, and laughing, since the book was a thriller political satire that made me laugh. Ten days later I had a finished draft. Short, about 65,000 words, but a finished draft. I have never mailed that book. Not completely sure why, to be honest, since I still remember and like it. This was the spring of 1987.

Then came Pulphouse Publishing. Years passed. Here comes 1992. Five years later. I was still selling short fiction when I got around to writing it, but mostly I just did Pulphouse. Then John Ordover calls and in the conversation with Kris wants to know if we would write a Deep Space Nine novel. Two months later we turned it in and I have never stopped writing novels since.

Five novels written from the Winter/Spring of 1985 to the summer of 1992. Over 90 novels written since those first five.

Now, during the years since 1992, I have had some times where I wrote every day, like it was a job, but mostly I wrote to deadline, often pushing back starting until I had to really panic and write hard to get to the deadline, which I never missed. Ever.

In the last few years, I am working to learn once again how to be more of a regular writer, going upstairs to my writing office at about the same time every night. It is working some at the moment, but to be honest I would rather work to editorial deadline. That’s how I do my best work.

But I suppose old dogs can learn new tricks, and since I have written regularly in the past, I know how. I just don’t enjoy it as much as play/play/play/panic/write fast and long/play/play/play.

But to each his own. Try every method. You will, over the years, find what works for you. However, if you are not producing pages, then your method is not working. But that’s a topic for another post.

Cheers, Dean

As I continue to slowly work on the bibliography section of this site, I thought this book might be a fun one to mention up front here. Actually, this is only one book in a four book series I wrote under this title for Adventure Boys. None of these books, plus the four books I wrote as Sandy Schofield for them, have seen print yet in any real fashion. Bummer, I had a blast writing them.

The idea for Adventure Boys was a great one while it lasted. And who knows, it might still happen.

This was a really fun series, set in the Wild West, and actually, this is the second book in the series. It follows five boys as they try to make their way across the west following a really bad guy and his gang. A perfect setting for all kinds of adventures, that’s for sure.

The company had some top writers working on different projects. Kevin J. Anderson, Michael Stackpole, Loren Coleman, Steve Perry. All of us wrote books for them that have never come out. I had a blast writing them and was under contract to write three more in this series when the entire thing went down.

I suppose that I should talk to the newer writers here for a moment about how often this happens in publishing. Simply, a great deal. Over the years I have been contracted for over ten books that fell through for one reason or another, not counting these eight. I have written, counting the Adventure Boys eight books, twelve books total that were under contract and yet never appeared. For those of you who think that one book, your novel, is going to make your career, this ought to scare the pants off of you. This is one of the major reasons that Kris and teach that writers are people who write. Period.

Sure, the point is to get your book published, but what matters is the writing. You have to do your best on every book, do you best getting it into editor’s hands, and then move on. Write the next book. And then the next. Because the publishing side of things is out of your control. You have a contract with a publisher, but past that, you have no control over what happens on the other side. None.

So, I had a blast writing these Wild Boys books. I got paid. I hope they come out at some point down the road. But if not, it won’t stop me from writing more young adult novels, more thrillers, more mystery novels, whatever. I am a writer. That’s what I do.

Cheers

Dean

As I slowly put together the bibliography section of this web site, I decided to talk about some books up front here, as I did under the Schofield name. And I do mean slowly, especially when there are about eighty novels I can talk about and well over a hundred short stories. I won’t talk about them all up front, but every so often I have a book that I am fond of and proud of, so I’ll banter about it here before putting it over on the other page.

This book came back to mind yesterday when I found a tee-shirt I had never worn while cleaning out a drawer in my closet. It is bright red and has a picture of The Shadow Warrior cover on it, and on it the saying “Who want some Wang?” is printed in bold. I am still saving it to wear at a special workshop or something.

SHADOW WARRIOR #1. For Dead Eyes Only. Pocket Books. October 1997.

I don’t think there were many Shadow Warrior novels ever done after this first one, even though I left the very last scene on a cliff hanger like a pulp fiction novel for the next author. This was a complete voice novel because in the game, the Shadow Warrior has a real voice and attitude, and for some reason, I really got into the voice, walking around the house for a month while writing this novel sometimes breaking into Shadow Warrior talk. Drove Kris nuts.

And there is one line in here that got me a call from the editor at Pocket. He was laughing so hard, all I could manage to make out was, “Can’t believe you did that.” Now trust me, that’s a phone call you want from an editor when you are writing comedy.

I remember writing the first fight scene in the restaurant and then walking around for a day laughing and worrying that I had taken it too far. I just reread that first scene and it still makes me shake my head and laugh. I learned a number of years back that this book, because it had gone out of print after about 40,000 copies sold, had become a collector’s item on the secondary market. I doubt it is anymore, since the so much time has passed, but at conventions, I tend to sign a bunch of these and have great discussions with fans about the Shadow Warrior. However, make note if you want to talk to me about this, I never played the game and have no clue about it. I just listened to a few lines from it before writing and tried to nail the voice. Everyone tells me I got it.

A fun book. And someday soon I’ll sit in a workshop with a bunch of writers and I’ll be wearing the “Who want some Wang” tee shirt. After all, if you can’t have fun writing, what’s the point. And I had a blast writing this book.

Cheers, Dean

I have a wonderful office. It is a full building, where my writing office is the entire upstairs with a fantastic view of the Pacific Ocean. Downstairs is a kitchen, living room, and Kris and my business office. It is where we do all of our e-mail and I play on eBay. Kris has her own building as her office and we live in yet another building here in the compound.

Yeah, it doesn’t get any better. <g> See why we don’t travel much?

I am sitting at my downstairs e-mail computer now in our business area. A few days back, on one of the nice days, I turned and stared out the window at the yard after finishing up on some business. I just sat and stared, marveling at how beautiful it was with the flowers and the ocean beyond. So instead of turning back to this computer, I got up and took a picture.

So, here is a picture of what it looks like out the window from this computer.

Cheers, Dean

The one writing question I tend to get the most is a simple one. “Why do I write under so many names?”

I usually want to say, but never do, “Because I can.”

Actually, that’s the most accurate answer. But before I jump into that aspect of this, let me talk about the obvious business reasons.

1) I write in a number of different genres. A reader of one of my romance novels might not want to pick up a copy of one of my thrillers. So the best way to keep them apart is just use a different name.

2) Sales of books in different genres are at different levels, and sales numbers are tracked in computers by name. So I have a small 10,000 copy science fiction novel and a 40,000 copy romance. I don’t want those numbers confused in any sales meeting or computer generated sales orders. Thus different names.

3) Dean Wesley Smith is known as a tie-in writer. So I write a thriller under Dean Wesley Smith and every review starts, “Star Trek writer… ” Thus a different name for those as well.

4) Speed. I write too damn fast for one name. This industry limits an author (unless you are a brand name) to one or two or three books a year. So I can have two books under one name, another book under my real name, another book under yet another name, and no one in the business cares. How do you think I got to over 90 novels sold? One novel per year, starting when I was 37 when I sold my first novel, would make me on the upper side of 130 years old. Nope, I write too fast for this business, so guess what, I can be a lot of names.

5) I am a writer. I don’t have an ego about a name, or care in the slightest if someone knows a book is mine or not. I know it is mine, that’s all that matters. I once stood in Safeway late one night staring at the paperback section, just smiling.  I had three novels there under three names. One Trek under my own name and two others under other names. That was a cool thing. Most writers have trouble with this part of many names. They must have EVERYONE know it is their book for some ego reason or another. Get over it or write one or two books a year.

6) Making a living with my fiction. Let me think, one writing career (name) vs three or four writing careers (names) pumping money into the house? Which is better? Duh. I have three unseen roommates who pay expenses yet never eat or cost me a thing. And my wife Kris has two or three unseen roommates as well in her office bringing in money. Makes it a ton easier to make a living at this business when you have a bunch of names working.

So, those are the business reasons, plus a few other minor reasons. But let’s look at the real answer: “Because I can.”

An actor, an artist, a business person. They are all stuck with their name, their reputation, their faces. With the exception of a very few brand names like King, no one knows what a writer looks like. Our work is not attached to our face, just our name.

Our work is not attached to our age, or our skin color, or our social level. It is only attached to our name. And anyone can change a name at any point. Women often change their name when they get married. No big deal.

Writers have the freedom to change their name from story to story, novel to novel, always being a fresh young face in the field.

Once, way back in the ancient history, I did a new writer column for a magazine Orson Scott Card edited. My job was to find and point out the new writers coming in through the magazines and books. I was a new writer as well, so it fit. And I got to pick up the phone and call the editors to get information about the new writers they published. A great assignment that Scott gave me.

Every time I did this, I was shocked to discover that so many of the “new writers” I was discovering and loving were simply pen names of long established writers. In one issue of one magazine, the same author had three stories under three names. As a new writer myself, this stunned me, until I started to understand the clear meaning of it.

Here is what it meant:

— Editors couldn’t find enough good material, first off, so they turned to established professional writers to fill their pages because deadlines didn’t change. A monthly magazine had to be out every month.

— Professional writers could make more money having more names.

— Professional writers could be thought of as new writers, getting around the baggage they might carry with their own name.

— Many professional writers found it was fun to write something completely different from what they normally wrote, what their fans expected. So, for example, a hard sf writer could publish a high fantasy under a pen name and enjoy the task of writing it without fear of what it would mean to his own name.

And so on and so on.

I’m fast, I enjoy writing across genre restrictions, I like more money, I enjoy the simple aspect of writing.

Writers write. Professional writers get paid for what they write. I am a professional writer. I couldn’t give a crap which name it is published under, or if anyone pats me on the back or not after reading it, or gives it a good review or not. Makes no difference to me, because what’s important is the writing.

Nothing more. Just the writing.

I write under many names because I can.

There, I said it.

Cheers, Dean

In September this year, just three short months away, a very special workshop will be held here on the Oregon Coast. September 11, 12, 13, and 14, Sheila Williams, the editor of Asimov’s Magazine will teach a short story workshop. She will be joined by Hugo Award winning editor and writer, Kristine Kathryn Rusch. (I’ll be there as well, but even with all my editing and short story sales, I don’t hold a candle to those two. I’ll be fetching the drinks.)

Kris and Sheila are on the top of the form. If they can’t help you become a better short story writer, a better writer in general, no one can. And you have four days with them.

The format of the workshop is going to be pretty simple. The writers signed up will have a few months to write two short stories this summer. Sheila, Kris, and I will then talk about the stories, and if Sheila really likes the story, she might have you send it in to her. At the workshop, the writers will also write a new story to assignment.

So the writers attending will have three stories in front of the editor of Asimov’s, letting her get to know you, get to know your work, get to know your fiction. This is an opportunity that just doesn’t come along very often.

The information about this workshop has been held close for a time, since my fear was that it would fill up too fast, but here we are three months out and there are still five spots open. So if you are interested, if you have been mailing stories to Sheila regularly and haven’t had any luck yet, if you just want to know how to write better stories and find out what is both right and wrong with your writing, e-mail me and put Short Story Workshop on the subject line. I’ll give you all the details.

A once-in-a-lifetime workshop. Sheila Williams and Kristine Kathryn Rusch helping you learn short fiction. A chance to sell stories to Asimov’s. It just doesn’t come any better. Don’t miss this one.

Cheers

Dean

Algis Budrys left us today. He hadn’t been well for some time, but still the shock of this news is surprising. I can safely say that most of my writing career, Pulphouse, the workshops we run, everything wouldn’t have existed without Algis Budrys.

I first met AJ on one very hot summer evening in Michigan in 1982. He was teaching that first week of Clarion and he had been a god to me since I read his book Rogue Moon in 1961. But I suddenly understood that gods were real humans as he came into the room, overweight, huffing from the walk, his shirt soaked with sweat. His doctor had just forced him to quit a three pack-a-day habit and he was cranky. But he still cared about all of us, and over the next six weeks, he kept showing that. I grew to really like him as a person and admire him even more.

The following year, he stopped by my bookstore in Moscow, Idaho and stayed for a few days, sleeping in the store. And he did that every year for as long as I owned the bookstore, being both a friend and a mentor.

In 1983 he bought my second professional story for the very first volume of Writers of the Future. At the awards ceremony in the spring of 1985, at Chasen’s Restaurant, he let me be the very first person across the stage to accept my award for the very first Writer’s of the Future book. I still have that picture of AJ behind the podium, Robert Silverberg, and Roger Zelazny standing behind him, and Greg Bear handing me the award.

In 1986, he called me late one night in late April at the bar where I worked in Moscow, Idaho, and said, “You want to go to a workshop with eleven other writers at your level taught by Jack Williamson, Fred Pohl, Gene Wolfe, and me?”

I said, “Of course.”

He said, “One week from now in Taos, New Mexico. The workshop is free, paid for by Writers of the Future, but you have to pay for your own travel and your own room.” Without a second thought I said I would be there.

I had no money. I was working two jobs, living in a hotel. But none of that mattered. I would be there if AJ said it was worth being there. I threatened to quit both jobs if they didn’t give me the two weeks off. It was that important to me because AJ said it was worth my time as a new writer.

Six days later I find myself in Arizona when AJ called my father’s house where I was visiting on my way driving to New Mexico.

“Two writers need a ride from Albuquerque to Taos,” he said. “Got room to pick them up?”

I said sure and he gave me the address.

Kris and Martha Soukup were the writers who needed the ride. And Kris and I have been together ever since. All thanks to AJ. The standing joke was that he convinced me to “pick up” Kris.

The workshops we teach are patterned after what AJ started at Taos. He picked twelve writers from around the nation who were just starting to sell and decided to help them. Kris and I try to do the same thing, in honor of what AJ did for us.

Some of you also might not know that I started Tomorrow Science Fiction Magazine and hired AJ to be the editor. The first issue, which we got out for Worldcon in Orlando, was a hit. Shortly after that, Pulphouse started having money issues, so I gave the magazine completely to AJ. From the second issue onward he did a great job with it as both editor and publisher. A far better job than I would have done as publisher.

I have not had the chance, sadly, to see AJ in the last five years or so. My loss.

The world of literature is today missing a great writer, a great teacher, a great person.

Bye, AJ. Thanks. Literally for everything.

Dean

It’s been a while since I’ve just talked about the goings-on here on the coast and on this site. So a short post tonight to update things.

First off, it’s taken some time to get the workshops all set for the coming year. The novel marketing/agent workshop worked out so well, we added the two into the schedule and doing all that and getting everything set up took time. We tend to only do these workshops about every three years or so. It takes that long for me to forget how much work they are to do. If you are interested, go to the workshop page and write me with any questions. But be serious about your writing before you do. We don’t mind that you are unpublished, but you had better have a great work ethic and have finished and have in the mail a bunch of stuff. <g>

Also, my writing is just powering along, gaining speed and projects by the week, so that’s a good thing. In fact, the writing is going so well that as of the first of June, I will no longer have my little hobby comic store. Those of you who were on the old web site saw the pictures of the construction of the store last spring and summer. Well, after a great year where the store made money every month, even in the winter, I’m selling it to my store manager.

Why sell it after only one great year? Simple. The writing is taking more and more time and that’s what I do is write. Over the decades to get to this spot, I always made the decision toward writing. Last year, when I built the store, the writing was in a lull and I needed a break, so I took one. But now the writing is back, projects are lining up, deadlines are looming, and it’s time to again make the decision toward writing.

In the early years of this business for me, I quit jobs to write, I borrowed money to go to workshops, I worked as a bartender instead of an architect or a lawyer because of the writing. That attitude got me to this spot with over 90 novels published, so I see no reason to hold onto the store. It was fun. Back to writing.

So clearing up all the details of selling the store to my wonderful store manager has been taking time as well.

And of course, there’s a little poker playing here and there as well. I doubt I’m going to make the World Series again this year, but that’s all right. I’d rather write. Maybe next year I can plan novel deadlines around a few weeks in Las Vegas for the World Series again. It’s just too much fun down there.

Looks like I will be at Worldcon (The World Science Fiction Convention) in Denver this August. It’s been over ten years since I went to a Worldcon, so I’m looking forward to seeing old friends again.

And with luck, in the next three or four weeks, a trip over to Idaho to visit family.  It’s been a year, so it’s past time for that.

And Kris and I are going back to Florida in January to that wonderful writer’s conference there. They invited us for a second year. Guess we didn’t anger the wrong people. Bluntness about writing tends to do that at times. <g> Anyhow, we’re both looking forward to that again.

And that’s the update.

One another note, I am looking for a way to set up something that will be a give-and-take about writing here.  Maybe a writing advice page where I add something every three or four days and answer questions.  Sort of a tamed down version of the old forum on my other site.  So stay tuned for that and more updates about the books I have written.  And stories about the process and writing of each book.

Cheers

Dean

Notice below I have a new short story out in Front Lines edited by Denise Little.  Just click on the picture to go get a copy off of Amazon.

My story is titled “Dinner on a Flyin’ Saucer.”

Okay, I have to admit, it is one of the stranger stories I have ever written, and that’s going some to say that.  And earlier I was talking about voice in stories.  Well, this story has so much voice, both author and character, that it is over the top in just about all ways.

A ton of great authors in this book with me, including my wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch.  Her story leads off the book and is so disturbing and so to the point, you will shudder after reading it.  My story has a lot of comic relief, thankfully.

I think that every story in this book is strong, to be honest.  Well worth your few bucks.

I’m very proud of this story in Front Lines.  Critics will hate it or ignore it, which makes me all the prouder of it, to be honest.  I set out to write something different, something with voice, something funny.  Denise Little liked it, I liked it.  I hope you do as well.

Cheers,  Dean