To an Absent Friend

Yeah, I still have this stuff.
Yeah, that done was on a
manual typewriter.

I was going through some old zines (in the 80s and 90s I was in some amateur press associations) as I was wondering if had I written about a particular science fiction convention. The ones I was looking at were written at time when (over a few months) a friendship had gone from close, to fractious, to sundered. One of the zines noted the moment when the ashes of the friendship were kicked over.

In the subsequent zine, a month later, I was responding to what someone else must have said about this once close friend. I wrote an entire page about him, explaining how close we had been, and looking back with regret on what had been lost. There was one line that really got me:

Once, when our friendship was still healthy, he told me that he could not converse for more than an hour without mentioning me at least once. With me, I admitted, it was somewhat less frequent, but still common enough that friends considered him to be an extension of me. I have often wondered if he still mentions me, and if so how.

That was thirty-eight years ago. The feelings still hit. I’ve lost contact with just about everyone who were my friends way back then. Most of the friendships just withered away, and their names no longer come easily to mind. This is the one I remember and regret.

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Some Thoughts on a Thousand Days of Journal Writing

It's a milestone
with more milestones to hit in the future.

To be clear, it’s not that I started my journal one thousand days ago. I started my journal 15,960 days ago,[1] during which time (by one means or another), I have written 6,301 entries covering 4,607 days, which means the lifetime average for my journal is 29%. It would probably go up a little if I separated out a few of the entries in which I caught up on my journal after a few days of not writing any entries. The number would be much higher if I had written more frequently,[2] and a bit smaller if I didn’t re-create an entry from time to time.[3]

I must have done
something, but what?

All that to say that I may not be the best person to be a guide to diligent journaling, something I’ve only accomplished since about July 2018.[4] On the other hand, as I look at my journal, I have nothing from July 11, 1999 and July 22, 2000. It’s worse than that. Every entry in my journal from May 11, 1998 to August 31, 2000 (843 days) is a re-creation, cobbled from photos, calendar entries, or whatever else I could get to show what I was doing on a certain day.

And yet, I’ve kept at it for the last thousand days. It was an evolving process, from missing years to that period between July 2019 and April 2019 where I missed a total of six days out of 303. Not too shabby. How did I get there?

For me, the big answer was going digital. No longer was it a question of finding pen and paper. No longer was it a problem that it was too dark to write. One of the major aspects of getting this done is that my digital journal[5] keeps track of how many consecutive day on which I’ve written a journal entry. With that kind of monitoring, you just don’t want to see that go back to zero. Writing in your journal daily can become a habit, but I can’t tell you how many days it takes to establish that habit. When Day One introduced streaks, I didn’t think it was going to be my favorite feature.

Not only can you see how many
consecutive days you've written,
you also can look back. 

Daily writing was the habit I wanted to establish. There are so many entries in my journal where I apologize to myself for missing some days, weeks, or months. (The year-long gaps start with a resolution to keep a journal, not to keep one on a regular basis.) If only that lovely blank book could have reminded me to it (apps can, of course). Besides having an app nag you about this (I could set a reminder), the other valuable thing I’ve found is having a certain mindset about my journal. What is this for? I have a few answers.

Well, that doesn't look like
a busy month.

I do value my journal as a chronicle of what I’ve done over the years. What did I do on January 23, 1982? I know, though the day (according to my entry) was pretty unmemorable.[6] How about March 23, 1982. No idea. I don’t have an entry. I wish I had, but I can’t go back in time and get myself to do better at journaling.[7]

It’s also a handy space in which to write, knowing that no one else is going to see it. I can explore narrative in it, wondering how describe things so that they’ll make sense to me later, especially when there are things that overlap. How do you write about that?

In one of the many books I have on writing, one of them says that unless you’re planning on writing a memoir keeping a journal is useless. I’m not the expert on being a financially successful writer. I still feel that writers should keep journal. First, there’s the awareness that many good writers who kept journal extensively. If it’s a bad idea, why did Christopher Isherwood turn out three volumes of published journals? It gives something to write. When you’re not up for writing a poem, a story, a novel[8], you can always get those words moving with a journal entry. You may not know what the characters are going to do next, but you might have an idea what you did last.

So you want to be a consistent journal writer? The best I can suggest is that you identify whatever obstacles there are to you getting a journal entry written and that you set aside time every day to work on your journal. This is not a “find time” sort of thing,[9] but a “make time” sort of thing. You have to make time for the things that are important or they will get squeezed out. Prioritize, find some, time, and best of luck in getting to a thousand consecutive days.

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1. Specifically, May 14, 1978.  ↩

2. There is a lost volume, but the last time I saw it, it noted in my journal that it had only three entries in it.  ↩

3. As in “while composing this entry,” which means some of the numbers are already out of date.  ↩

4. Yes, July 2018 is more than one thousand days before this post was written. In 2018, I finally managed the trick of missing no more than a single day in a month. My entries are pretty regular from 2014 onward.  ↩

5. I have been using Day One for more than a decade.  ↩

6. January 23 has been memorable in some years, but 1982 was not one of them.  ↩

7. If they invent time travel, I have a list ready of advice for younger me, some of which is “don’t have sex with that guy or that guy either,” but also “please write in your journal daily.”  ↩

8. Should I add “blog post”? Yeah, let’s add blog post.  ↩

9. Time is never found.  ↩

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Respect Your Local Copy Editor

Don’t do this. I beg you.

I’ve recently been engaged in a couple of discussions in which people talked about their idiosyncratic views on punctuation. I have to start by admitting that unless you’re a publisher (or a copyeditor working for a publisher) I don’t actually care what your views on punctuation are. This might be harsh, but it’s true. It’s like if you decided that epitome ought to be spelled phonetically and damn what dictionary said, you were going to do it.[1] If you want to have people care about your views on punctuation, then become a publisher (or the head of a publisher’s copy editing department). Then you’ll have a real opinion. An enforceable opinion.[2] Other than that well, you’re just someone who makes trouble for copy editors. And I’m telling you not to do that.

When someone asks my opinion of how something should be punctuated, I typically go for finding out what the general practice is. In other words, I look at some major style guides and do exactly what they says. If I disagree with that style guide, I’ll do exactly what it says. Again, if you’re publishing your own stuff you can do whatever you damn well please, but if you want someone else to publish your stuff you’d better follow how they want it formatted. Let me give a couple examples:

Some noted authorities.

Should there be one or two spaces after at the end of a sentence? (Spoiler alert: it’s one.[3]) The choice of one or two spaces represents two separate attempts to emulate typeset material while using a typewriter. When the typewriter was introduced, most books published in English used what is called loose spacing, there’s a lot of space after the end of a sentence. An em space, which is — wide. Books in that era often had generous margins and gutters too. Beautiful pages that really don’t have a lot of type on them. To emulate this on a typewriter, typists hit an additional space after the end of each sentence.

The French style was for tight spacing. They formatted their pages without a lot of space after a sentence. More than an en space –, but less than an em.[4] The idea was to create a page of uniform text color. And text color adds up to gray. Think of it as how a page would look if you took a badly focused photo of it. The French wanted it uniform, the English and Americans wanted it non-uniform, with little holes in their text. Then came World War II.[5]

With paper shortages due to the war, there was a desire to cram as many words onto the page as possible. Goodbye gutters. Goodbye margins. Goodbye extra space after sentence. They were probably people who wanted to go to the old style of page design after the war. The answer to them was no. The war had come, the war had gone, but French spacing was here to stay.[6]

In the late 80s came the desktop publishing revolution. I was in that revolution. In the mid–1980s I was doing desktop publishing. I have produced camera ready copy. In order to make the camera-ready copy look like something that was set in physical type, I needed to emulate tight spacing. When I learn to type, I learned two spaces after the end of each sentence. Only a few years later I was retraining myself to type on the single space after each sentence. But it’s just a convention.

A few years ago I took an extension class for which the professor insisted that all papers needed to have two spaces after each period. Her class, her rules. That said, I had to retrain myself (again) to be able to type that way.[7] She admitted that her own editor chided her for sending in manuscripts with two spaces after a period, though in these days of digital submission, at least that’s an easy find and replace. Find all double spaces and convert them to a single space. But the question still occurs to me that if you want to have your stuff published why would you make them do this extra step? For those who say they can’t this do, I wonder what they when typing abbreviations. Do they type an extra space after Dr., Mr., or oz.?

Onward to one of the other type of graphic conundrums, the quotation mark. Should commas and periods go inside or outside quotation marks? We return to our noted authorities and the rules are pretty clear. Generally. The American convention is that all the small punctuation (commas and periods) slide in under the closing quotation mark. It’s tidier. The British convention is to place punctuation outside the closing quotation mark. They also use single quotation marks where American use double.

Like Benjamin Dreyer, I agree there’s a certain sense to British practice, but there’s also a certain sense to American practice. To quote Dryer: “I find the sight of those periods and commas hanging outside tuition marks saddening.”[8] It creates this ugly little notch of white space, between the last word and the punctuation mark. To me it makes the punctuation a bit unconnected from its sentence. There’s not a lot of visual difference between a comma after a quotation mark (word”,) and one with an extra space before it (word ,). In The Elements of Style we find: Typographical usage dictates that the comma be inside the marks, though logically it often seems not to belong there.[9] This is likely one of E. B. White’s additions, as it does not appear in Strunk’s edition of 1917.[10]

You (who do this: ”.) are here.

If you’re an American putting your commas and periods outside double quotation marks, you’re using neither system. It puts you in the middle, I guess, south of Greenland and bit east of St. Pierre and Miquelon.[11] If that leaves you all wet, it’s not my fault.

If you’re an American using British punctuation convention,[12] are you also using British spellings? I thought not. I have not checked with any copyeditor on this question, but I suspect that if you’re an American who is submitting to an American publication using own version of quotation marks and end punctuation, the copy editor will hate you. Treat the copyeditor right. Do you really want someone to go through your entire manuscript marking a circled tr every time you have a quotation mark with a comma or a period?

All this said, all other punctuation stays on one side or the other of a quotation mark, depending on its source.

“Edward E. Tanner III (Patrick Dennis), better known for Auntie Mame, collaborated on the memoir Guestward Ho!” The exclamation mark is from Tanner and Barbara Hooton, not me.

Be good to your copy editor. If you want to break out of the herd, do it with your writing, not your arrangement of spaces or quotation marks.

A final thought on citation formats. While there clear practices on spaces after sentences (one) and periods and commas with closing quotation marks (the quotation mark goes last) when I worked for a researcher it seemed almost that every journal had its own house citation format, none of which agreed with the MLA style I learned in college. No one ever debates these. Those who are writing for publications with house guidelines for citations just follow them. Do as they do. Follow the rules.

[Post in haste, edit later. I've given this post a bit of copy editing. It could probably use more.]

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1. Would that be “aypitomee”? I’m not sure.  ↩

2. Please—I beg you—do not make “aypitomee” part of your house style guide.  ↩

3. Why do I say “one”? I checked submission guides. Editors have the issue that if all submissions are produced under the same guidelines, they can figure out how things will go on a page before they get there. Two spaces mess this up. And they have to go through and take them out.  ↩

4. The em space and dash get their name from being the width of a M. The en space and dash get their name from being the width of an N. (But it’s usually half an em.) While you’re down here, the em dash, en dash, and hyphens (the narrowest of them) have specific uses. En dashes are good to separate dates, so 1708–1742, not 1708–1742.  ↩

5. WWII was not fought over typographic standards, though prior to WWII, the Nazi Party had banned blackletter types (which Hitler thought Jewish) going for more modern typefaces, particularly san-serifs. The Fraktur types were the typographic continuation of textura, which Renaissance scribes called “Gothic,” because they thought it came from Germany (it developed in Italy). “Roman” hands were from the Carolingian Empire, that is, they came from Germany.  ↩

6. Seriously. Page margins you could put a thumb into and never worry that you were going to cover the text.  ↩

7. Any typing I did that wasn’t for class had one space after each sentence (well, not at the end of paragraphs, of course), so retraining to never again type two spaces after a sentence was easy.  ↩

8. Dryer, Benjamin. Dryer’s English (New York: Random House, 2019), 83.  ↩

9. Strunk, Willam F., and E. B. White. The Elements of Style, 3rd ed.(New York: Macmillan, 1979), 36. Repeated in the 4th edition (Needham Heights, Massachusetts: Allyn & Bacon, 2000) with an update in the examples, still on page 36.  ↩

10. https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/37134  ↩

11. I chose midway between New York and London. I’m not trying to claim that these are the two poles of the English language, although they are two major centers (centres if you’re British) of publishing in the English-speaking world. (No disrespect intended to Toronto or Sydney.)  ↩

12. Let’s dismiss the perception that British English is somehow “more correct” than American English. Not only is “more correct” not really a thing, British claims of American linguistic novelty are usually unsupported by history. The spellings “color” and “honor” were perfectly acceptable to the typesetters of the First Folio (Shakespeare’s collected plays, 1623), at which point there was no United States.  ↩

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Filling in the Journal

What can happen in 600 days?

I have been, over the years, an indifferent diarist. Although I started my journal more than forty-two years ago, there are huge chunks of time without a single entry. But okay, I mean, what really can happen over a mere 728 days?[1]

Yeah, if I could go back in time,[2] I would convince myself that even if I wrote a few words a day, it would be better than writing nothing. It probably wouldn’t do any good, since the intention of writing every day was always there, but sometimes it just wasn’t possible.

It’d be late and and I’d be in the dark.[3] The ride would be too bumpy to reliably mark things down. I’d forget where I put my journal.[4] I’d go a trip certain that I was going to keep a journal, but then leave my journal at home (which is better than leaving it in a hotel, never to be seen again). It is quick and easy to not get a journal entry written.

Hard to search through these

Over the years, I filled (at least) eighteen notebooks to some degree of completion.[5] That’s it, barring some forgotten volume resurfacing. I have finally transcribed the lot of them, in some cases replacing bad handwriting with bad typing, so I will probably revisit the volumes from time to time, when I look at an old entry and say, “just what the hell did I actually write here?” Now comes the next phase. It’s time to fill in the gaps. I have a plan.

Now, because I have been a less-than-diligent diarist, these are the things I must do:

See what I wrote elsewhere. For those times when I didn’t write a journal entry, sometimes I wrote something about it elsewhere. A zine.[6] An email. A social-media post. Time to check my words. I’ve been delighted to find that some of the gaps in my journal have already been written.

Like this one

See what I shot. There have been plenty of occasions where I didn’t jot anything down on a trip[7] but I did take lots of photos. That’ll jog your memory. If nothing else, they provide a simple guide to what I did that day, akin to a one-line journal entry. “Went to the museum” is better than just a blank.

What can I remember? And in the absence of any documentary evidence, there’s always the chance association. Every once in a while, I’ll remember something and—aware that there is no corresponding journal entry—jot down what I remember. Sure, this is nothing like a contemporaneous entry, but it’s better than nothing. (I also mark these as such, since they are memories.) What you remember today might slip from memory.[8]

You can’t bring back the past. There no do-overs,[9] but there is a chance—even after the fact—to improve on spotty journaling practices.

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1. That’s the gap between my last entry in 1983 and my first entry in 1985. I mean, yes, that’s almost the entirety of a relationship I had with a boyfriend and included two changes of address, but really.  ↩

2. There’s this fantasy of avoiding some great personal screw-up, but some of those unpleasant events led me to today, so I’ll settle for the lesser goal of not avoiding them, but at least chronicling them.  ↩

3. You can’t write in bed in the dark with pen and ink. I’ve tried.  ↩

4. One journal entry celebrates finding my journal after it went astray at the end of a trip. Had I left it in another country? If I had lost it, I might have now forgotten it existed.  ↩

5. One early volume is lost, though when I last saw it, I did note that it spanned all of three days before I put it aside, only picking it up again after I had started a new one. I don’t think I’ve seen it since. It could turn up.  ↩

6. Yeah, I used to do that.  ↩

7. See above with journals that didn’t make it along for a trip.  ↩

8. There have been times when I’ve remembered something with great clarity but have not been able to jot it down, only to draw a blank later as those memories had sunk into the background.  ↩

9. As nice as that might be in some cases. Oh, here are some mistakes I would undo. ↩

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The Boskone Queerbashing

What follows is something I wrote up for a zine after an incident at the science fiction convention Boskone XXII (February 15–17, 1985). I am not completely certain whether the events below happened as Friday became Saturday, or as Saturday became Sunday. I’m kinda splitting the difference and since 16 February 1985 was one of the days. Leaning more to the evening of the 16th, morning of the 17th.

Boskone XXII was full of surprises. There was great interest in my all-gay apa,[1] I hosted one of Boskone’s two Gay Fandom parties, and also ran a discussion group about Gay Fandom (yes, it was a rather gay con for me). I saw lots of movies. And I almost got queerbashed.[2]

Almost was more than enough. The intent to do more was there And—although I can’t be certain—I think much of it was premeditated.[3]

Start with the first Gay Fandom party. The crowd was only mostly gay. I have no problem with sympathetic straights being at a gay party. The point was to have fun in a gay-positive atmosphere. Then there were people like Drew, brother to someone I knew.[4] He and his friends were not sympathetic. When they showed up at the party, I was a little apprehensive, but there were more of us (and who can stop an army of lovers?).

Drew, in addition to being non-sympathetic, isn’t even a fan. Yes, folks, he’s one of the over-growing number of Mundane Fandom.[5] When I started going to cons, fans had a good reputation with hotel staffers (this heard from a maid (okay, I could be cynical and say she was staring for a bigger tip, but…)). This year, I heard about how the hotel liaison was trying to calm the hotel about the vandalism (most hall phones were destroyed).[6]

Well, they were quiet (although at one point, Drew called me over (I was in the middle of a conversation and said so)) and soon left. That’s when things began. There were a few annoyance calls and one in which Drew told me that his brother wanted to meet me by the film room (1. I don’t deal through intermediaries—his brother knows that; 2. I rarely come when summoned, which his brother knows too).

Finally, at 3 am., I was preparing to leave the hotel. I wanted to say goodbye to a few friends. This took us (Ron and I) past Drew and his friends. “Queers,” they said, “faggots.” Bluntly speaking, these things are true, but I’d rather not be called them. Ron and I have only reaction to queerbating: we kiss and walk on.

They got louder and cruder. “Faggot,” said Drew, “it makes me sick that my brother used to hang around with a faggot. I wish I had a gun so I could shoot your balls off, faggot.”

“At least he can find them,” shot back Ron. My turn: “I’d rather be queer than an asshole.” This got them mad.

They pursued. Drew pushed me. “Leave him alone,” said Ron. Then a large brick wall, disguised as a blond man appeared and said, “leave them alone!” He pushed the queerbashers away. We left, going for security, since a fight had broken out. We left, going for security, since a fight had broken out, and we wanted to make sure justice was served.

Unfortunately, by the time we got hotel security to come to the fourth floor, everyone had disappeared (everyone! combatants and spectators alike).

I was a little shaken up by this, so I suggested to Ron that we go to the film room and watch the rest of Slaughterhouse 5. So we did and told a few new friends of our experience. We soon became a group of angry young queers.

There are people in this world who think that gay people should put up with such abuse. Fortunately, con operations did not agree when we told them of the incident the next morning. The next morning, Ron and I bumped into a committee member we both know. We told her out story. She told us to meet her in Systems. So, we went there and told our story (just as it is above).

Later, we had to return to Systems. It seems the guy who stopped the queerbashing pushed Drew’s girlfriend, causing her to break her knee.[7] So, we retold our story (to another con staffer), pointing out that we could understand Drew & Co. feeling attacked, but that the attack was borne of chivalry.

[Not in my original account, but we were told by con staff that Drew and his friends had been ejected from the con and told that they were not welcome on the premises. They were also told that knew and believed me and that their tale of how Ron and I initiated things just wasn’t credible.]

Later, I saw Drew’s brother. I told him the story, and promised to do what he could although he doubted he could do anything. (We saw him still later; his parents refused to order Drew to come home, further Drew had sworn to get us).

We were a little nervous about all this. You can’t count on large individuals to come to your rescue. Fortunately, at most time we were with large groups of fen,[8] and usually several gay fen.

We went to Burger Thing,[9] and—as chance would have it—they were two tables way from us. This somewhat ruined our appetite, but nothing happened.

The rest of the weekend went by with only one more incident. While the finally incident wasn’t violent, it was homophobic. Earlier that day, I was about to go to the bank and didn’t want to deal with weirdos to say dumb things to people in top hats, so I had loaned my hat to a friend. I hadn’t seen her after that, so I went to a party where I knew she’d be.

I left several friends in the con suite and went off for the 13th floor. En route, another elevator passenger saw my badge and said, “You’re John Dumas. I’ve heard of you.”[10]

“In conjunction of with that?”

“You were involved in that thing where the girl got assaulted.”

“What girl?” I questioned, then it hit me. “Her—she was injured trying to assault a friend and me.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said the gentleman., “you only suffered verbal abuse, she has a broken knee.”[11]

There’s no talking to some people and this one was going to the same party. So, I collected my hat[12] (much to the disappointment of the friend who was now wearing it (sorry, Adam)), and explained why I couldn’t stay—and I was expected elsewhere.

My friend later told me the topic of the party became how stupid some people could be, excusing the intent of committing violence, just because the intended victims escaped unscathed. There is hope for humanity.

A few words in postscript
Ron and I broke up less than a year after that (for reasons that had nothing to do with the queerbashing at Boskone XXII). He’s a great guy (we’re in touch), but we were a disaster as a couple.

The incident was well remembered a year later at Boskone XXIII, which saw the founding of the Gaylaxians. I’m happy to say that only positive gay experiences happened at Boskone XXIII.

The question of what would happen with out gay fans at the con had been answered. Yeah, there could be problems, but the con would have our back (kudos to the staff of Boskone XXII, who handled things beautifully).

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1. An amateur press association seemed the best choice to me, since I assumed that gay science fiction fans were sufficiently rare that there would be no way to have a local organizations (1986) or a convention (1988), both of which I later had a hand in.
    ↩
2. I wrote “almost” in 1985 when I wrote this up. I was queerbashed. They made physical contact with me. (Queerbashing and queerbaiting were the terms used by the LGBTQ (then LGB) community. Later, non-community newspapers softened these terms to gaybashing and gaybaiting, because when you’re talking about physical or verbal assaults, you need gentle language.)
    ↩
3. I think anything less than an abject apology for existing and a promise to leave the con immediately would have been taken as a pretext for a physical altercation. They were spoiling for a fight. I wasn’t there for that.
    ↩
4. When I originally published this in my zine, I named him. I’ve removed a few identifying other details from this story. If you knew me in 1985 and you’re curious, yeah I’ll tell.
    ↩
5. Boskone had a problem in the mid ’80s. It had grown large enough that it was dubbed the “Winter Worldcon” and had attracted an increasingly large contingent who weren’t even remotely science fiction fans. These people increasingly became a problem for Boskone.
    ↩
6. And it would be two more years before Boskone XXIV, the “Boskone from Hell,” after which no hotel in Boston would host the convention.
    ↩
7. So it was said. That said, a few years later, I injured a knee when I was thrown off my bicycle and made a one-point landing on my kneecap. I didn’t break anything. Within an hour, my knee swelled so much that I couldn’t bend it for a week. That Drew’s girlfriend was ambulatory does cast some doubt on her story.
    ↩
8. Fannish slang of the era, with fen on the model man > men. Men is an i-mutation plural. These were common in Old English, but only a few of them are now left. That’s progress for you.
    ↩
9. Oh, figure it out.  ↩
10. Within a couple years, people would see my name on a badge and want to talk to me, but it was in more positive contexts.  ↩
11. Again, though this was her story, I’m inclined to believe that it was just a story.
     ↩
12. Although I have many hats, I don’t have this one anymore.
     ↩

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“You Needed Better Friends” An Optometric Observation

See, I really do own glasses.
No need to see them on my face.

 This year—2020—marks fifty years of vision correction for me.[1] I recently had my annual vision check.[2] I was chatting with my optometrist and this recalled the days when I wore glasses.[3]
My glasses of that era could best be described as “heavy, thick, inconvenient.” Their thickness (due to my prescription) meant that optometrists would regularly tell me “no.” As in, “can I get wire frames?” No, I needed thicker frames to support those lenses.[4] Later would come the question of whether I could get contacts. “No, they don’t make them in your prescription.”[5] Heavy, thick lenses came with all sorts of problems.

My glasses were always either sliding or being knocked off my face. Grabbing my glasses because their weight was pulling them off a sweaty boy’s face was bad enough, but it seemed that anything that happened to me would result in my glasses going projectile, once into a campfire. The lenses were spared, but the frames were trashed. I had to go some days without my glasses. My father had been given tickets to a Red Sox game, and I went even though I couldn’t see more than about a foot beyond my face.[6]

Contacts, how wonderful!

The friend who bumped into me, sending my glasses flying, at least meant no harm. Thick glasses on which I was utterly dependent also made me a target. From third grade on[7] it seemed there were always bullies who would snatch my glasses from my face and hold them out of my reach.[8] Glasses weren’t only expensive, they were difficult to replace. If anything happened to them, I’d be lost for days. If I remember, replacement glasses took two weeks. Plus I couldn’t see. Taking my glasses away was a great way of making me panic.

When I mentioned this to my optometrist, she said, “children can be so cruel.”

“It wasn’t always children. Friends snatching my glasses from me persisted into my early twenties.”

“You needed better friends.” That was good diagnosis.

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1. Do I get a prize for that? Maybe new eyes, 20/20 without correction, also the ability to focus on close without reading glasses. You know, like normal 25-year-old eyes. I’ll settle for 30, I’m not fussy.
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2. This has grown into a series of visits, as now I see an ophthalmologist before I go to see the optometrist. I have old, very nearsighted eyes.
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3. Not that I don’t wear glasses now. I spend most of my waking hours with contacts, but I have glasses and wear them.
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4. Eventually with changes in lens materials, I was able to get wire frames. My current glasses are frameless, an impossibility for me in the 70s or 80s.
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5. I asked annually nevertheless. My gas-permeable lenses taught me I needed to wait for soft contacts. At one point, a friend asked if I had considered Lasix. It was, of course, not available in my prescription. When I was 40 an optometrist suggested it, although there was no guarantee of 20/20 vision and I would still have to wear reading glasses. Thinner glasses didn’t make it worth it.
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6. Baseball happens more than a foot away.
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7. Just do the math.
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8. Just to be clear, I wasn’t just the kid with thick glasses, I was the short kid with thick glasses. The short, chubby kid. The short, chubby, non-athletic, nerdy kid with thick glasses. My shirts might have all been concentric red and white circles. Yeah, I was bullied. (Note to my former bullies: fuck you.)
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The Non-Writing Life

I do use one of these
occasionally, though most of my
writing is done electronically
these days.

I recently got a message from someone who pointed out that as long as he had known me (about forty years), I had been writing. What it showed to me was how much we had fallen out of touch. To be clear, he hasn’t known me for forty years; he knew me for about four years, but we had a falling out (partially my fault[1]) about thirty-six years ago. Truth be told, it’s not like he’s some unique individual from this era. I’ve lost contact with just about everyone I knew back then.

I met this friend[2] when we were in our teens. I was an avid science fiction fan, and like many science fiction fans, I wanted to write science fiction too. My journal from that time repeatedly names stories I was working on, with some indications that they’re fantasy or science fiction. All these stories are now long lost and while there are some lost things I really wish I still had, the stories I wrote in my teens are not all that important to me.

We’ve had sporadic contact since then, much to my disappointment.[3] We briefly connected on Facebook, but I’m pretty certain he left that to become inactive on Google+.[4] We also connected on LinkedIn, which I joined about a year alter when I was job hunting. Later, when it became clear that I was not returning to the exciting world of in-house IT support,[5] I changed my profile to say that I am a freelance writer.[6] I’d like us to be friends again. I’d also like to be slightly taller,[7] and have my hair back. They can do things about hair, though I haven’t bothered. But I’m writing about writing here.[8]

Now we can construct a timeline:
We’re good friends and I’m writing. → That whole period he knows nothing about. → We’re barely acquaintances and I’m writing.

I was writing then, I’m writing now, I must have always been writing. Not so. There’s a gap. (In a way, this is somewhat comforting, given my scant publication record[9].)

Let’s talk about that whole period he knows nothing about. Let’s wind back thirty-eight years. There was an end to a lot of writing in 1983. I stopped trying to write stories. There’s about a two-year gap in my journal writing. I did keep writing zines during time for two amateur press associations.[10] But no fiction writing. Then the apas stopped. One grew increasingly hostile to the presence of an out gay man. The other was nothing but gay men, but it eventually died. And then, all I was writing was my journal.

No fiction.[11] Life got busy. I had dropped out of college and entered the work world. The spare moments I had for writing evaporated. No more filling an hour between classes by grabbing a desk in the library and scribbling away. There are people who write while holding down a full-time job,[12] but maybe not while holding down a full-time job, looking for an apartment, and navigating the beginnings of a romantic life. There I was, early 20s, insecure and inexperienced, finally meeting other gay men. Certainly a distraction from writing.[13]

I also became one of the founders of a group for LGBTQ[14] science fiction fans. That took up a lot of time, especially as the group started to grow and we started running our own conventions.[15] I moved and had to start job hunting all over again. Writing looked like it was permanently pushed to the back burner.

How long is the gap? About eighteen years. I didn’t start writing again until 2001. I had some ideas and started writing. I even had a plan establish my chops with some short stories and build from there. I had come to the conclusion that I just didn’t have the turn of mind to write fantasy or science fiction,[16] so my new attempts were erotica. This was just as adult magazines started folding, due to the ready availability of porn on the Internet. My potential market had dried up.

I turned to writing a novel. Why not? I had an idea. It was clearly something that would need to be worked out at the length of a novel to get everything I wanted on it. I proceeded then to hammer away at it over the next fifteen years. After fifteen years, I had an unfinished novel that really wasn’t compelling enough to keep working on.[17] Also, work just kept getting busier and busier. I found that after pulling lots of overtime, when I tried to write all my characters wanted was to pour a glass of wine, put their feet up, and watch some tv.

I really salute the people who hold down full-time day jobs while managing to write after work and on weekends. I have no idea how they manage it. My experience was that I’d look forward to some writing time only to find that I’d be working overtime due to some crisis at the office. On so many weekends, I’d see my chance for getting some writing done recede into the distance. Then my job was eliminated.

My new job was “job seeker,” but it really wasn’t an eight-hour-a-day position. The résumé was fine tuned. I scanned through job postings. Early on I did my online sessions with an employment counselor (one of my severance benefits). I also wasted some time just frustrated and unhappy. Then I got back to writing.

One of the early projects was this blog, in part to rediscover my own voice (after years of writing corporate speak), in part to see if I could write at least a thousand words a day.[18] As the blogging gave me more practice and confidence in my voice, I returned to writing fiction. After a while (and a wholly unsuccessful job hunt), my husband agreed to let me just focus on that. The job hunt was over.

I’ve kept at it. I’ve turned out some stories, one of which I even managed to sell. Sure, there have also been some times when life’s demands have slowed this down or even stopped. But I keep writing. I think I’m going to get there.

p.s.: If you’re reading this, you know who you are. Send me some emails. Please. After all, this post is for you, whether you read it not.

Minor personal update: I was curious and looked through some old emails. I told him in 1999 that I wasn’t writing. Just before I got back to it.

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1. Tough time in my life. It was when I came out. I was a bit of an emotional wreck, which was tough on me and lots of people around me too. It was also a period of transition for me, since I still have contact with people I met not long after. My belated apologies to all those whose patience was pushed past the limit.  ↩
2. “Friend” seems a slightly inaccurate term, since we haven’t spoken in thirty-six years, we swapped a few emails some years ago (he owes me one), but to call him a “former friend” would just make me feel sad.  ↩
3. This post is some of the stuff I’d want to tell him, but since communication is unlikely, I figured I’d get it off my chest this way. Look, if you’re reading this, you know who you are, you know what to do. You have my email address. Answer the email I sent you. It’s wholly unlikely he’ll actually ever see this blog post. Truth be told, I don’t think he’s interested in putting in the effort.  ↩
4. Remember Google+? Sure, you might now. I don’t think we’re far away from people wondering if they had accounts there or no. “Yeah, maybe I was on it, I’m not sure.”  ↩
5. Your browser may not be equipped to properly display sarcasm tags.  ↩
6. It’s a largely unpaid position.  ↩
7. If I woke up at average height, the need to buy a whole new set of pants wouldn’t bother me that much.  ↩
My belated apologies to all those whose patience was pushed past the limit.
8. As opposed to getting maudlin about a lost friendship.  ↩
9. That is, one story, though part of that is for lack of trying. (Maybe that’s fodder for another blog post.) The story is “Shotgun” in the anthology THCock. It makes a fine gift for any gay stoner you might feel comfortable giving erotica to.   ↩
10. If you are unaware of what an amateur press association is, best to think of it as a group blog of the pre-Internet era. They were obscure then, more so now. My blog stats are pretty minimal (thank you, oh kind reader). These were even more limited, read only by the participants. I need to mine them for whatever comments I made about my life during the time when I wasn’t keeping a journal.  ↩
11. Sure, my journal is just my point of view, not an objective account of my life, but it is as truthful a narrative as I can make it.  ↩
12. I salute these intrepid souls.  ↩
13. I think if the options are find a quiet corner and work on a story or have sex, it’s a pretty obvious choice.  ↩
14. I admit the anachronism here. When the group started, the term transgender had not yet been coined. The initialism g/l was prevalent, soon supplanted by lgb. The Gaylaxians were open all, without regard to sexual orientation.  ↩
15. Which persist. The first Gaylaxicon was in 1988, the most recent one in 2019, though I haven’t been to one in years.  ↩
16. I do keep trying. I even brought a fantasy piece to a writing workshop where the professor praised it for some good and inventive writing (yeah!) then completely eviscerated it (no!). As she pointed out, the best part didn’t even belong in the story.  ↩
17. In part, it was probably a victim of my own inexperience. After countless restarts and revisions, I sapped the life out of it. Plus, I really should have outlined the whole thing, instead of trying to just write it organically.  ↩
18. Yes, though a thousand words of blogging (which I’ve already passed in this post) is a lot easier for me than a thousand words of fiction.  ↩

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You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

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This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!