What-Ever-Happened-To?…
That Is a Really Sad Question
Talking to my best friend of 62 years the other day and that What-Ever-Happened-To question came up a number of times. Half the time, sadly, neither one of us knew the answer. And for 75-year-old-guys, we are both still very sharp and have good memories.
And I have no doubt that at times we all are the subject of that question in one group of people or another.
Why I call it a sad question is because in the writing community, it usually means the loss of a dream. Usually some writer really pushing and learning and publishing and then something happens and the writer vanishes. Health, family, discouragement, and just loss of desire to keep pushing. And the person goes another direction. Not a worse direction, just a different direction.
Today, finishing up the Anthropic settlement stuff, I got hit by this over and over and over. It seems that some writers, bless then, decided to put in the entire table of contents of an anthology. So to get my share that I had claimed, I had to go through all the names.
Sadly, many of the writers on these table of contents were dead and had no estate to make a claim for them. Many of them had been my friends. That’s fun. Not.
And a share of the writers in these anthologies were names I went “Wow, what-ever-happened-to them?” I remembered them and often these were hotshots at the time, but had no staying power. Other names I flat could not remember, and these were professional anthologies of the 1990s.
But the worst anthology was one of the Strange New Worlds anthologies that someone put in all the names on the table of contents (bless them for making a ton more work for those of us actually claiming…) In theory, as the editor, I bought every story in the volume, but honestly, I had no memory of three quarters of the names. In fact, some of the names I checked to even make sure they were in the book.
All new writers, selling to a professional anthology, who seemed to not make it past that first major step. Granted, a few writers every volume went on to publishing careers, but 90% of the writers in the volumes did other things. More than likely just selling a Star Trek story was a goal and they didn’t need to push any more.
The saddest part of the professional anthologies were the friends who had died. Great writers who had lasted a long time and had large bodies of work. I miss many of them and the great conversations and fun. But except for one friend that I always quoted for business advice and who left us too early, no other writer had estates claiming anything that I could tell.
Tells me how little those estates are being tended as those major writers, many of them close friends, fade into history and into the land of ‘what-ever-happened-to” with their wonderful fiction.
I am glad this Anthropic shit is over. Just don’t need that kind of reminder again any time soon.