Taking on hell with a fire-bucket

There are times when it is probably relatively sensible to back away. When the ‘good idea’ fairy is being their most helpful… Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), humans are not very good at that. Monkeys like myself, less so. This explains a great deal about the situations I frequently find myself in, as well as a great deal about the fact that the human race is not extinct or a tiny little group living in a cave in Africa, debating on the digestibility of cousin Thag. Because if we spent all our time backing off because something wasn’t totally safe and totally pleasant… we’d lose a lot less people (immediately, and then more, later) and not figure how to cope with dangers and make things we thought impossible and dangerous do-able – or more do-able.

There has to be a selective advantage to taking on hell with a fire-bucket of damp sand, or we’d have bred it out of the human race by now. I believe the social engineers of modern society are trying their best to get rid of it (partly because it makes people so had to control) but it is quite a large part of the gene-pool. I’d like to attribute this facet of the human race to intelligence or something charming… but the truth is it often comes down to being a bit optimistic, and not fully informed. Of course, that doesn’t stop the obstinacy part kicking in once the optimism and lack of information dissipate somewhat, but then obstinacy goes with taking on enormously difficult and fraught situations.

Now, it almost certainly doesn’t surprise you that the good idea fairy and his military cousin and Dave have been associates for most of my life. They have regularly tried to shorten that, and I have certainly gone along with their cunning plans. My survival – and indeed often making the crazy ‘good idea’ work – have often come down to that obstinacy, and a fairly large dose of ingenuity… and a LARGE chunk of optimistic belief that there are always ways to solve anything.

When – around the end of apartheid, jobs in the biological sciences and in fish farming were effectively non-existent, the good idea fairy said “Write books. It can’t be that hard. You’ve just got to be better than sf/fantasy’s average output and people will love your work and you can make a reasonable living at it.” I – to my credit, did NOT think it was ridiculously easy, and that I was brilliant at it. I just thought (on the basis of reasonable evidence) that I had taken on a lot hells with a fire-bucket, and, by obstinacy and a habit of learning how to do things – and thinking up new and unusual solutions to overcome obstructions, succeeded a lot more often than I should have. What was one more?

As I learned, a lot. I was woefully ignorant about how publishing worked, believed it a meritocracy which was producing a lot of books I thought that I could write better than, if not better than my role models, like Pratchett or Tolkien or Heyer or Zelazny or… (I could go on for a while). I didn’t have to write better than my role models, I just had to write better than the average on the bookseller’s shelves. Eventually, of course, I learned it was more about push than meritocratic pull, and to succeed without push the merit had to be exceptional. If I hadn’t been so obstinate, I would have quit, because it was a huge hell and a tiny fire-bucket.

Because I always try other ways to ‘solve’ anything, I was running multiple approaches — including any competitions — I could find. I had no guidance (I wasn’t even online, we were desperately poor – and submissions with ‘return postage’ in a foreign currency would typically cost half our monthly budget.) I entered every writing competition I could find, which unsurprisingly were not really looking for sf. Still, I kept trying, trying submission to the slush, to short story markets, and competitions. The first one I won was NOVA – the South African Science Fiction comp. Yes, it was a relatively small pool to fish in. But when every avenue gets nowhere, just one breakthrough helped my determination and obstinacy to press on. It didn’t lead to publication then – but it has now — about 25 years on. CANDYBLOSSOM was me trying to out-Simak Simak… and that small success colored my writing. I went on from there to become South Africa’s first internationally published sf/fantasy author… and onto making the good idea fairy’s idea work. I still haven’t put out the hell that is trad publishing. But I am working on going around it – solving the problem in a different way.

So: I was very pleased to be asked to write the foreword to this collection, and to have a story in it.