Wednesday, November 1, 2006

Stray comes home

Some of you may remember a novel which was called Crimp, and before that called Library of Souls, which I was writing with a childhood friend, Ramin aka David Ackert.

We started it before I began this here journal (when this blog was a journal) -- I mentioned it in the second entry. It ranged between project, something-I-should-be-doing, and overwhelming obsession for five years or so. I took half of it to Blue Heaven the first time, we finished it, and then I took it to Blue Heaven again, and then I abandoned it to Ramin. Ramin poked at it for a little while before wandering off too.

There's something sad and mournful and bitter about letting a novel go. It feels like this: you had this whole gang of people you knew. You cared about them and fretted over them and were stunned and amazed and irritated and frustrated by them for years. You herded them through danger, some to safety, others not so much. They taught you things. All through it, you were planning at some point to introduce them to the world.

And then one day you're not any more.

So it is with a certain amount of glee that I am able to say that we've sold a short story pulled from the carcass of that novel, "Stray", to F&SF. There are a few other such, which may make it and may not. But "Stray" means that at least some of you, at some point, will get to have a passing aquaintance with Ivan and Muriel and Sarah.

Congratulate Ramin -- it's his first fiction sale. He's an accomplished actor (cf. imdb) and businessman -- I just saw him the other night at the Kennedy Center, in a brilliant performance of all the male characters in Mary Apick and Ginger Perkins's "Beneath the Veil" . (Googling reveals, to my chagrin, this interview from a time when we were confident that Library of Souls needed but a few tweaks for us to send it out).

At heart, he's a big ol' fanboy, though, my companion through umpteen dozen pubescent Moorcock-and-Lovecraft-ripoff roleplaying campaigns. I know how happy the inner 12-year-old Ramin will be to see his name in print in F&SF. I've been there. Huzzah!