It was merely a premonition that led me to check the Asimov’s site earlier this week to see if by chance James Patrick Kelly’s column incorporating the e-mail interview he did with me a while back had made it online (in advance of print publication) yet. It had, so I blinked it. I believe this is the first interview I’ve ever done, not counting a couple times I’ve answered e-mail questionnaries about the site from seemingly legitimate academic sources.
Checking my daily log, I see that I e-mailed by answers to Jim Kelly’s list of questions on May 18th. It was barely a couple days later when he returned e-mail with a draft of his column, recasting a few of my responses as interpolated text, but not cutting anything substantial. Of course I noticed that I’d not really answered his fundamental question — why do they (the webmasters) do it? He suggests egoboo, which I suppose is a small part of it, though it’s not like I’m any more sought after on the convention participant circuit than I was back in my short fiction reviewing days (which is to say, once every year or two, from a local con I wouldn’t have thought to attend otherwise, at most), nor have I felt any other impact on my personal life, which might as well be set in the Northwest Territories, for all that I have personal contact with anyone in the field in between conventions 3 or 4 times a year. It’s nice that the website brings in a bit of revenue, enough to cover costs and books, but that’s a long way from covering mortgage or gas or any other actual living expenses, in stark contrast to Locus Magazine’s situation, and so that can hardly be considered a primary motivation.
The real reason, I suppose, borders on the evangelical; it’s my way of propagating my belief in the power of the literary blend of science and art. Which is to say, justifying an anti-social tendency dating from age 12, that golden age. Somewhere in there; it depends on your perspective. The real real reason, of course, is that I happened, as much by chance as anything, to acquire the responsibility of portraying Locus on the web, without any particular qualifications for doing so. Apparently I’m doing an adequate job, though I’d be the first to imagine a list of things the Locus website might be doing better.
I’ll try to get back to updating this blog more regularly; if I let personal distractions interfere, that would be letting them win. (To say nothing of the terrorists.)
