Magic, Theft, Time, and Money

3. Time

Years have passed since my first book was published. Actually, virtual years passed while I was writing Walk, because my longstanding love of characters from a book I read as a teen had to catch up with my clicked awareness of being not just a reader and budding writer, but a female reader and writer, a female person, in a world dominated by masculine values and preferences. In fact it was the shock of that catching-up that hurled Walk — and me with it — out of the cozy patterns of SF as it was mainly being written, and read, by the majority in those days.

I landed in virgin, as it were, territory: the place where you suddenly realize that yeah, you call yourself a feminist, but jeez, look, there are no women in your book. Wait, wait a minute — yes there are, there they are, in the background — enslaved drabs too unimportant for the major characters to take notice of. Suddenly that becomes the most interesting part of the story, and a female slave called Alldera steps forward to be the exploratory carrier of that interest, all of which changes the story dramatically and irrevocably into something radical in content, if not in form. Walk came out as an adventurous quest refocused to reveal a feminist dystopia, with an emergent female hero who went on to command her own books from me, three more of them over the next thirty years.

I couldn’t write just one book about crucial matters of huge import that I was only just coming to perceive and understand myself, could I?

Reading on in feminist theory and social commentary in the seventies, I kept coming across articles by feminist scholars positing the lost or covered-up existence of a real nation of Amazon warriors, most likely Scythians or proto-Cossacks or the like. I thought it was a lovely idea, but also a load of well-intentioned bilge — that is, wishful thinking. That didn’t mean that I couldn’t take the idea of a tribe of warrior women living without men and throw it forward into my created future, and work out what such women might be like and how they might live. Hence the second book, Motherlines. One extrapolation led to another, and the whole epic unspooled itself in my head and on the page over the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Meanwhile, of course, I wrote other kinds of things: my first short piece, a little novelette, I think it is, called "Scorched Supper on New Niger," which I tackled only because George R.R. Martin insisted that I had to have a piece of fiction in a collection called New Voices that he was editing, to showcase the talents of all the nominees for the John W. Campbell Award of that year (best first novel in SF — Walk was a nominee, although not a winner). I protested that I was not a short story writer but a novelist, but George persuaded me to try, and out came this nifty little condensed space opera built out of my Peace Corps experience in Africa in 1961-2.

Other books happened too, like The Vampire Tapestry, which began as a short story published in Omni, and which is still selling after nearly twenty years; and a mainstream story with a ghost in it (Dorothea Dreams) that let me explore the life and career I might have made for myself if I had followed my parents’ ambitions for me and become a visual artist instead of an author; and four fantasy novels written for young adult readers (but much read by grown fantasy fans as well) about the joys and terrors of growing up in a magical Manhattan. Not to mention a stage play and some short works, SF and fantasy and horror.

Meanwhile, danged if I haven’t gotten older; old enough, right now, to wonder what my next step is. The largest work of my life so far, the Holdfast Chronicles that began with Walk, is over. What’s next? I can’t tell, because I don’t yet see.

At the moment, I am fooling with this web-page (with the invaluable help of a gifted colleague, Vonda N. McIntyre),and puzzling out how best to get my work plugged into the advertising and production process of the net, which of course keeps changing. Just trying to keep track of new opportunities there is a full-time job.

I’m winding up work on two non-fiction books that have lain quietly in a drawer until the Holdfast books ended and I could turn to these older pieces with my full attention. I’m re-reading favorite books, and returning to a certain spiritual vein opened decades ago when I was utterly captivated by a small book of Zen Stories. As often as I can I go to the gym where I listen to books on tape while I slog away the miles on the treadmill.

I watch "West Wing" and struggle along with Tibetan t’ai chi, at which I remain terrible but devoted; that, and boxing. While I can’t risk being punched or knocked down, because of residual problems from a detached retina some years ago (it was because of a dog’s nose; but no, don’t ask), there is nothing like slamming the hell out of a punching bag, with my hands taped and my bag gloves on, to drain away the tension and frustration of living in, well, you know; the world, our world, this world.

I’m old enough to be thinking about other things too, beyond living in the world, so I do some of that too; sometimes while I’m slamming the hell out of the heavy bag.

Interesting: I am not writing fiction. Not right now. Watch this space.