Jonathan Hoskins
Dear Mr. Hoskins,
Good to hear from you again. This idea of having a beginning writer be obliged to revise his story so often that it eventually changes completely is intriguing, but hardly credible. I would recommend you try fantastic notions like this on the oddball fantasy market.
Care should be taken on titles. I like this one, but surely it should be "Fell Swoop," and I'm still not certain of its relevance to the story.
Brian Thurgood, Editor
There the story ends, completing its circle. The several parts of it have histories of their own. The title is a parody of "Advise and Consent."
"Frustration" I wrote in 1965 as a comment on what I saw when I moved to the south from the north. Racism exists everywhere, but in the north folk are more likely to be ashamed of it, while in the south they can be proud of it. I tried "Frustration" on NEGRO DIGEST, where it was bounced with a rejection slip. I showed it to a black writer I know, and he made no comment. What do I know about racism, having been brought up in a non-racist environment? It disgusts me.
Beauty, like ugliness, is largely in the eye of the beholder. I started a series of vignettes in 1957 while I was in basic training in the army, about a boy called "Little Pot." This didn't relate to the drug of that name, or the later Cambodian regime, but to the state of his personality, which was sort of un-potty-trained. In 1958 I typed up six of these vignettes, titled "The Stone," "Beauty," "War," "The Behemouth," "The Nihilist" and "The Sisters." I submitted them to F&SF magazine, which bounced them. The first showed how Little Pot, instead of putting a penny to be flattened on the track as the train came by, put a stone, wrecking the train and turning the passengers into steaming meat. As I hinted, Little Pot could be mean. The second you have read. I also used it in a later novel, Tarot, as the introduction to Chapter 25. That wasn't its first publication; it appeared in a fanzine back in the early 1960's. "War" had a pun on the infantry: a squad of tough babies who finally got eaten by the marines, which were underwater monsters. Later I drew on that pun for Xanth, with babies growing on an infant-tree. The behemouth was a monster like a behemoth, but with a larger orifice, who seemed threatening but turned out to have a romantic interest in Little Pot's dog. As I recall, the nihilist believed in nothing at all, and vanished when someone asked him whether he believed in himself. The sisters were devastating: Cathy was short for Cathartic, Emmy was short for Emetic, and Asia—oh, that Euthanasia!
"The Wind of Love" I wrote in 1961 or 1962 as an exercise for a correspondence course in writing. I was supposed to start with a blank mind and write a piece showing a certain shade of emotion, so I did. No, I don't feel that I owe my later success to that correspondence course; the folk who ran it meant well but really didn't understand the SF/fantasy genre. They thought that THE SATURDAY EVENING POST represented the ideal in stories.
The last two vignettes were written for this story. So "Revise and Invent" covered a decade in my writing effort, with several odd bypaths. But it was fun in its way, for me, and I hope for you too.