Member-only story
Finding The Lost Compass For A Creative Life
What I wish I’d known when I had my first go-round at being a fulltime writer: believe in yourself and don’t obey cultural rules instead of following your own path
Look: an ersatz woman gazing out at an ersatz LA —
I was barely 40, sitting in the Dangerous Visions booth at the LA Times Book Fair. Thirty people came with books for me to sign. It was my first collection of short fiction and poetry.
A line of people!
I’d signed a few books when a monstrous man interrupted and threw fraudulent court papers at me over my 10-year-old daughter’s head.
She cried. The bookshop owners laughed. There was a picture in LOCUS, the “magazine of the science fiction field.”
I should have left that man forever, left that town, I should have left that state, I should have gone to Europe, to Japan, to Australia, to Canada, anywhere —
Else.
My mother and father wanted to move to New Zealand. She might have made it work, as one of the top animation art directors in the world.
Before I was born, before she died, she’d flown to London to meet with Ronald Searle, and to Santa Rosa…
