I just LOVE Gordon van Gelder
(Ahem!) In a strictly manly, platonic way, of course. By which I mean not the way Alcibiades loved the strictly manly Plato, but more like writers in penury love editors who buy stories.
I just sold the worthy Mr. van Gelder of F&SF a longish short story called One Bright Star, which I have trying to sell for years upon years. And he paid me a very healthy sum for it.
Sold, at last, hurrah!
So, Numphar! Do the dance of joy! Release the hydrogen-filled Zepplin of happiness! Release the caribou herd of happiness into the unexploded ordinance field of delight! Blow the horn and ring the bells and pinch the parlormaid and throw the taxcollector down a flight of crooked stairs! Let the festive antics commence!
This novella It is one of the favorite things of my own I have ever written. It asks the question of what happens to Pevensy children, or Wendy Darlings’ brothers when they grow up. (Assuming they survive train wrecks, of course. Dorothy Gale does not grow up: at the end of EMERALD CITY OF OZ, she and her kin are taken to fairyland to live forever, and nothing grows old in Oz, nor dies. Wendy we know has a child named Jane.)
My little woman, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, Mrs. Wright, who is the brains of the Wright gang, came up with a suggestion for a snappier ending: it took me only an hour to rewrite the last few paragraphs, and suddenly a no-sell story became something snapped up by the market on my first try. Mrs. Wright is also known in my house as The Muse of Good Advice. Half the ideas in my books are hers: I am confident anyone who likes my writing will like her novel when she comes out. (Look for it! CHILDREN OF PROSPERO by L. Jagi Lamplighter.)
There is a big advantage to being married to a woman smarter than you. When I approach her loveliness, so absolute she seems, and in herself complete, so well to know her own, that what she wills to do or say, seems wisest, virtuousest, discretest, best; all higher knowledge in her presence falls degraded. Wisdom in discourse with her loses, discount’nanc’d, and like folly shows.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
