In My Years, I Have

The Child In Each Of Us Knows Paradise. Paradise Is Home. Home As It Was Or Home As It Should Have Been. Paradise Is One's Own Place, One's Own People, One's Own World, Knowing And Known, Perhaps Even Loving And Loved. Yet Every Child Is Cast From Paradise- Into Growth And New Community, Into Vast, Ongoing Change.

It's Interesting How Many Science Fiction Writers Get Going When They Are Very Young. I Was On A Program With Greg Bear And He Mentioned That He Had Gotten Started Writing When He Was Eight. And I Began Writing When I Was 10. I Think We're Influenced By The Stuff, We Find It And We Love It And We're Influenced By It....i Know I Collected My First Rejection Slip When I Was 13, And I Went On Collecting Them For A Long Time After That.

The Thing About Science Fiction Is That It's Totally Wide Open. But It's Wide Open In A Conditional Way.

And I Have This Little Litany Of Things They Can Do. And The First One, Of Course, Is To Write - Every Day, No Excuses. It's So Easy To Make Excuses. Even Professional Writers Have Days When They'd Rather Clean The Toilet Than Do The Writing.

Beware: Ignorance Protects Itself. Ignorance Promotes Suspicion. Suspicion Engenders Fear. Fear Quails, Irrational And Blind, Or Fear Looms, Defiant And Closed. Blind, Closed, Suspicious, Afraid, Ignorance Protects Itself, And Protected, Ignorance Grows.