November 9, 2005

• Hurray, Randy Ingermanson has been laid off!

  He is taking it well, and (as he ought! ) he is pouring all his newly-freed time and energy into equipping you and me to be successful novelists and storytellers. I am thrilled.

  Of course, this means we all ought to go and buy some of his books right away, to help him make ends meet until his next Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is published. I highly recommend Transgression, Premonition and Retribution, his time-travel trilogy. Oxygen is great too, but sadly I have not had time to finish its sequel The Fifth Man (not because I lost interest; my wife hid it from me so I would focus on what really needed doing in life. Either that or I serendipitously misplaced the darn thing before it cost me another night's sleep).

  I met Randy at a writers conference, and was surprised and delighted when he welcomed me-the-obvious-neophyte to sit with him and other published authors. We spent more than an hour brainstorming plot devices and character complications for one of his friends who was under contract for another book in a series but had run out of ideas. Sitting and chatting with seasoned novelists late into the night was one of my highlights of that long weekend, and I never would have dared intrude had it not been for Randy (and John Olson, another cool SF novelist who befriended me).

  Randy publishes an excellent (and free) fiction-writing e-zine that I highly recommend to anyone who wants to write for publication.

  • 1:21 pm
  • 2 Comments