Tag: Ray Bradbury

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Today is Ray Bradbury Day

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Today is the 99th anniversary of the birth of a man who filled me with the love of words, of sentences, of stories, of ideas, of possibilities.

A man who gave me the best advice on writing I’ve ever gotten (Don’t think, write.)

A man I wanted to name my daughter after. (The fam objected, alas.)

A man who looked out at a group of book-clutching, fannish outsiders at an environmental conference and said, in tones of wonder, “Oh, but you’re all my children” and brought us all to tears.

The man who wrote Something Wicked This Way Comes, the love of my literary life. I think it is one of the most beautiful and powerful works in the English language and I often read passages from it aloud just to hold the words and sentences in my mouth.

I love you Ray Bradbury, now and forever. Thank you.

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Confessions of a Ghost Writer: the Big Scary

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I read a column this morning in CodeLikeaGirl (on Medium) in which Kira Leigh eloquently expressed the sheer scariness of pursuing a career as a freelancer. I was compelled to respond because while Kira is fairly new at freelancing, I’ve been doing it for a while now and I wanted to share my story.

It seemed somehow fitting that I post it here, too.

I’ve been freelancing as a ghostwriter, editor, book doctor and cover designer for about twelve years now. The good news is that it becomes mostly less scary. The bad news is that you may still have bouts with poser syndrome. My particular variety has to do with the quality of my writing—which has won me a “New York Times Bestseller” banner that I can put on my own books—and my qualifications to be attending professional writing or genre conferences. I suffer Poser Heebee-jeebies before every convention I attend.

I first toyed with the idea of quitting my day job as the manager of a software development team back when my third novel came out. I didn’t pull the trigger, though. I told myself I liked my job too much. I liked the people I worked with too much. Both of those things were true, but the real reason I didn’t quit my job to write full time was that it was scary. It took several years of watching the company I worked for go down hill to get me to hang out my “moonlighting” freelance shingle. I punched up my high tech resume, though I really no longer wanted to do high tech. My heart was no longer in it.

Within days of me creating a moonlighting page on my website, I and my entire department got laid off and I was drop-kicked out of a company I’d worked for for 15 years. Oddly, I was ecstatic. Energized. I took it as a tap on the shoulder from God: “Follow your calling. Do what you love.” I spent the rest of the day working on my website, put my CV out on a number of freelancing and job search sites, and by the end of the week, I had my first freelance writing job—from a Monster.com connection, believe it or not. I have not looked back.

🙂 I’ve even gotten cheeky enough to fire a particularly difficult client.

I wish you all the success in the world. And share some advice I got early in my writing career: If the world is blowing up, write. If chaos is breaking out all around you, write. If everything in your world is falling apart, write. And if everything is going better than you could possibly have expected, write. No matter what, just write. It is our way (to borrow a phrase from my hero, Ray Bradbury) of making reality behave by pretending to look the other way.

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Dear Speculative Fiction—a Love Letter

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Trodayne Northern

My inestimable agent

My inestimable agent, Trodayne Northern, recently decided that what he really would like to have on the new Prentis Agency website is a series of love letters from his writers to their beloved genres. Here is my “how do I love thee” letter.

Dear Speculative Fiction…

As a child, I discovered first-hand that reality was a difficult beast to tame. I was shy, too tall, too chubby, and wore braces, glasses, and orthopedic Oxfords. I was the kid that nobody wanted on their baseball team because I couldn’t run and had abysmal eye-hand coordination.

219p4ycI met you, if you’ll recall, when I was six and my father let me stay up to watch ”The Day the Earth Stood Still”. You terrified me and exhilarated me and gave me a fascination with the unexplained and alien.

Phillip K. Dick spoke of being ”content with the mysterious.” I was more than content; I was in love. I read ghost stories and fairy tales and sagas about the exploration of the unknown. I discovered that something I could do better and faster than any of my peers was read and imagine things.

When I reached my teen years, I admit, you put me off a bit with your warnings about impending doom and post-apocalyptic horrors. You seemed to be about endings and I wanted to read about beginnings. I suppose it’s no surprise, then, that it was stories of first contact that drew me back to you. Andre Norton opened the door and welcomed me in, and Ray Bradbury closed the door firmly but gently behind me. I was in. And when I began to write seriously, I began to write science fiction and fantasy.

People tried to dissuade me. They said you were silly, impractical, unrealistic, even demonic, and that I shouldn’t spend so much time with you. They said you were escapist fiction that would lead me astray. They echoed literary critic Lee Mortimer, telling me that you were a ”genre of escape literature which takes the reader to faraway planets—and usually neglects to bring him back.”

Did I want that to happen to me? they asked. ”We don’t read ’that stuff’,” they assured me. ”Can’t you write real, serious fiction?”

ray-bradbury-love-460x723But I was a child of Bradbury, and I knew the real you. I also knew your ”secret”. Ray Bradbury whispered it to me in an essay entitled On the Shoulders of Giants. He said:

”The children sensed, if they could not say, that fantasy, and its robot child science fiction, is not escape at all. But a circling around of reality to enchant it and make it behave. The children guessed, if they did not whisper it, that all science fiction is an attempt to solve problems by pretending to look the other way.”

If I had to give one reason why I love you, it is that. You satisfy my deepest impulse to solve problems, to make our sometimes chaotic reality behave by only pretending to be gazing into the eyes of an alien or fey lover.

Yours completely,
Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

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Pretending to Look the Other Way

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ray-bradbury-love-460x723So, there’s this guy, this man, this wonderful writer that I adore above all others. His name is Ray Bradbury.

It is because of him that I write fantasy and science fiction. It is because of him that I love words and strive for lyrical, evocative, luscious, vibrant prose. It is because of him that I learned something important about science fiction and fantasy: It is not escapist fiction the intent of which is to make reality go away.

No, no. Far from it. Ray Bradbury taught me that the purpose of fantasy and its “robot child”, science fiction, was to, in his words, “make reality behave by pretending to look the other way.”

We seek solutions for today’s problems by framing them in the future or in a world that doesn’t exist. I am fortunate to be able to make my living pretending to look the other way when I am really not. Writers are sneaky. We are always watching, listening, contemplating reality, putting ourselves into endless other pairs of shoes to see the world, thereby, the way someone else sees it, so that we can catch reality unawares and warn of potentials, explore possibilities and suggest solutions.

So, if it seems that I am looking the other way, know that I am not. I’m only pretending.