Epiphanies Or Why Was I Not Already Doing It?

Epiphanies are funny. They provide that moment of clarity that, for whatever reason, you didn’t have before. Most epiphanies—at least mine—prompt you to say “Yo, dude, why hadn’t you been doing that before now? Why did it take, well, an epiphany to show you?” I can never answer, really. I always just chalk it up to “It Wasn’t the Right Time”.

So, there I was, sitting in front of my computer, and I read SFSignal’s report of Day 1 of ApolloCon. Dang, if it wasn’t in Houston, my hometown and where I now reside. Why the heck didn’t I know about this? And much of the focus was on SF/F *writing*. Aw man! And, the capper: David Hartwell, the editor of the Year’s Best SF anthologies published every year. The latest is Number 12. Again, I asked myself: why wasn’t I there?

Grumpily, I tell my wife about the ApolloCon and her first response was this: “Geek as you are, how did you not know about it?” Leave it to spouses to reinforce everything. My answer: well, I have not been paying attention to SF because I’m writing a straight mystery after my historical mystery. And that’s when I dawned on me: why am I doing that? Why, indeed.

Chris Roberson said it best in this interview:

“Science fiction is my native culture. (I'm stealing this phrase from someone else, but I can't for the life of me remember who originally said it. If no one steps forward, I'll claim it as my own.) Growing up in the States in the seventies and eighties, science fiction was ubiquitous. Everything from Saturday-morning cartoons to comic books to late-night B-movies to pulp novel reprints to blockbuster summer movies--it was all science fiction, in one form or another.

So I…decided not to fight it anymore.”

Bingo! That’s me, too. I mean, I have already written about how Star Wars changed my life and my love for the Harry Potter books. Why am I not writing anything science fictional? Dunno. But I’m starting now.

I took out my ideas book (Yeah, SF geek that I am, I still love the hard copy experience when compiling ideas) and wrote down all the various ideas that have been floating in my head for the past year. All of these that I have abandoned in some bizarre culling method to get to just ‘real’ stuff. Whatever.

Oh, and I bought Hartwell’s Year’s Best SF 12. Got to know what kind of stories that are being compiled in year’s best anthologies so I can, someday, get my work in there, too.