Leslie Fish on “Old Purity” in REALMS OF DARKOVER

Realms of Darkover®, the newest Darkover anthology, will be released in May 2016. You can pre-order it at Amazon (and it will be available at other outlets soon). Here’s a contributor interview to whet your appetite!

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s beloved world of Darkover encompasses many realms, from glacier-shrouded mountains to arid wastelands, from ancient kingdoms to space-faring empires. Now this all-new anthology welcomes old friends and new fans to explore these landscapes of time and place, history and imagination.

Leslie Fish says she learned to sing and to read at a very young age, playing guitar at sixteen, and writing the first of hundreds of songs shortly thereafter, including settings of Rudyard Kipling's poetry and the “all-time most notorious” Star Trek filksong ever written: “Banned From Argo”. She’s recorded a number of albums and composed songs, both alone and collaborative, on albums from every major filk label. She was elected to the Filk Hall Of Fame as one of the first inductees. In college, she majored in English and minoring in psychology, protest and politics, joined the Industrial Workers of the World, and did psychology counseling for veterans. Her other jobs included railroad yard clerk, go-go dancer, and social worker. She currently lives in Arizona with her husband Rasty and a variable number of cats, which she breeds for intelligence.

Deborah J. Ross: When and why did you begin writing?

Leslie Fish: As soon as I learned to write, I started writing stories, jokes, songs, poems, anything I could put on paper. I'd always loved storytelling, and writing was a way of preserving a story, plain and simple.

DJR: Tell us about your introduction to Darkover.

LF: I was poking through a local bookstore and came across The Sword of Aldones in paperback -- and I was hooked.

DJR: What about the world or its inhabitants drew you in?

LF: I was fascinated with the idea of a society of psychics, complete with a technology of psionics.  And of course there were all the other fascinating intelligent beings on the planet.

DJR: What do you see as the future of Darkover?

LF: Expanding!  My latest story is about one of the native non-human(?) species plotting and politicking to survive and succeed in the aftermath of the Terran Empire.  I can imagine countless tales about the human and non-human Darkovans dealing with that future.

Monday Wisdom From Mary Pickford

This thing we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down.



When I read this, I think of how babies learn to walk -- by falling down a lot! Fortunately for the human race, we are too darn stubborn to let that stop us from trying again.

Original Vision vs. Compromising With the Market

A recent discussion with a fairly new, immensely talented writer highlighted for me a dilemma that most of us will face sooner or later. What do we do when what we really want to write, when the stories that catch on fire in our imagination, do not fit into a neat marketing niche? All of us fall somewhere along the spectrum from safely, predictably commercial to unclassifiable, idiosyncratic, and therefore of no interest to traditional publishers. One highly successful genre writer confided in me that her fantastic sales numbers were the luck of the draw. “I happen to write stories that are commercial and draw a large audience,” she said. “It's my natural authorial voice.”

I also know writers who are so original in their vision and so delightfully quirky in their execution that editors throw up their hands in frustration because although they adore this author’s work and see the author as the next great literary voice, they cannot envision a way to market it. In the best of times, such authors found a home in the midlist, and that still happens, although less frequently now than when editors had more power (and the freedom to discover and nurture new authors).

If you believe in your work, how can you be sure but this is not infatuation with your own words but that your work truly is of high quality? Every writer I know goes through spasms of self-doubt. Writing requires a bizarre combination of megalomania and crushing self-doubt. We need the confidence to follow our flights of fancy, and at the same time, we need to regard our creations with a critical eye. Trusted readers, including workshops like Clarion and Clarion West, critique groups, fearless peers, and freelance editors can give us invaluable feedback on whether our work really is as good as we think it might be. Of course, they can be wrong. It may be that what we are trying to do falls so far outside conventional parameters that only we can judge its value. It may also be that we see on the page not what is actually there but what we imagined and hoped.

Margaret L. Carter and Roy Carter on “A Walk in the Mountains” in REALMS OF DARKOVER

Realms of Darkover®, the newest Darkover anthology, will be released in May 2016. You can pre-order it at Amazon (and it will be available at other outlets soon). Here’s a contributor interview to whet your appetite!

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s beloved world of Darkover encompasses many realms, from glacier-shrouded mountains to arid wastelands, from ancient kingdoms to space-faring empires. Now this all-new anthology welcomes old friends and new fans to explore these landscapes of time and place, history and imagination.

Deborah J. Ross: When and why did you begin writing? (And anything else you’d like to share about yourself and your life.)

Margaret L. Carter: After reading Dracula at the age of twelve and becoming enthralled with vampires, horror, fantasy, and “soft” SF, I started writing fiction at age thirteen because I couldn’t find enough stories of the kind I wanted to read. In the early 1960s, my only sources were the public library and whatever paperbacks I came across in local stores. I especially wanted fiction from the viewpoint of the “monster.” I was writing my own “good guy vampire” stories long before they became popular. I eventually earned degrees in English literature through the PhD level, on the premise that as a college instructor I could get paid for reading books. That plan didn’t quite work out, given the post-1970s slump in the academic job market; I spent most of my working life as a part-time legislative editor for the General Assembly of Maryland.

When Les and I met as teenagers in a church group, he was also writing already, mainly science fiction. Our authorial aspirations drew us together. His father had retired from a career in the Navy and settled in Norfolk, Virginia, where I grew up. After getting married, we attended the College of William and Mary. Les became an officer in the Navy after graduation. His Navy career put his writing on hold for several decades. Upon retirement, he returned to it.


DJR: Tell us about your introduction to Darkover. What about the world or its inhabitants drew you in?

Monday Wisdom From William Penn

Look not out, but within… Remember it is a still voice that speaks to us in this day, and that it is not to be heard in the noises and hurries of the mind; but it is distinctly understood in a retired frame.

~ William Penn, 1644-1718, American Quaker and founder of Pennysylvania