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Volume 3 of the NESFA Press Collected Short Fiction of Roger Zelazny.
It's been a while since I read the first two volumes, but this series is so wonderfully put together and such a credit to NESFA. Volume 3 does not contain any of my real favourites but is still a pleasure to read, in large part due to the editors' excellent commentary and the extensive quoting of Zelazny himself. That said, I'm afraid his poetry is way over my head to the extent that I don't even make the effort to try and decipher it. This is a real pity as poetry was kind of central to Zelazny and his poems alternate with his stories in these volumes.
Here are various bits that caught my attention, mainly to do with the process of writing ...
It's been a while since I read the first two volumes, but this series is so wonderfully put together and such a credit to NESFA. Volume 3 does not contain any of my real favourites but is still a pleasure to read, in large part due to the editors' excellent commentary and the extensive quoting of Zelazny himself. That said, I'm afraid his poetry is way over my head to the extent that I don't even make the effort to try and decipher it. This is a real pity as poetry was kind of central to Zelazny and his poems alternate with his stories in these volumes.
Here are various bits that caught my attention, mainly to do with the process of writing ...
- Neil Gaiman quotes Zelazny as having said to him "Most of my better short stories are the final chapters of novels I haven't written".
- In reference to his short story "Dismal Light" featuring Francis Sandow (of "The Isle of the Dead" and "To Die at Italbar"), Zelazny wrote "In writing of any length, I always compose - either on paper and then destroy it, or in my head and let it be - a scene or scenes involving my protagonist (and possibly separate ones for other important characters) having nothing to do with the story itself - just something that happened to him/her/it once upon a time. I accept it as a real experience, a part of the character's life history, and I may even refer to it in the story itself. But I never include it. I do this under the belief that the character should be larger than his present circumstances indicate, should be defined for me in terms of a bigger picture of his life than the reader ever sees." This story "Dismal Light" was the one time he broke that rule and let one of these back stories be published.
- Another quote from Zelazny: "....in my book "Lord of Light", nowhere in it will you find the word "which" because an editor decided to scratch out "which" everywhere it occurred and substitute "that"."
- Zelazny again: "I learned another thing only after several years of writing. To show how naive I was, I did not know that other writers plotted their books. I didn't know this until I was asked for a plot line, and I realized that I couldn't do one. Basically my approach to writing a novel is to construct a character. Once I have a character, I try him out in several situations just to see how he reacts. Then I take two situations that strike me as interesting. I begin somewhere near one of them and write my way through, almost free-associating, to the second situation....". He then continues to explain how he writes, ending with: "My only hope, as I see it, is the fact that I rely on my subconscious. I will continue to trust it. If it lets me down, I guess we'll sink together".
- In May 1969 Zelazny resigned from his day job in the Social Security Administration with a view to making his living as a full-time writer....... "This switch to full-time writing did not increase his output. He averaged a novel per year, and his short story writing declined. He'd been more productive when he wrote only in evenings and on weekends".
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