| Well. It's winding down again and there is some news. It's not good. My friend and sometime mentor, MARCO PALMIERI, was let go from his job at SIMON & SCHUSTER along with 34 others in what was, I'm sure, the aftermath of some furious salary crunching. I know nothing of these matters and won't opine but I do know what Marco has meant to my professional life (and therefore my non-pro life). I had just come in second in the now sadly defunct STRANGE NEW WORLDS contest and had pounded Marco's e-mailbox with pitch after pitch which were each quickly (though not cruelly) rejected. After what I had thought was a pretty auspicious beginning, I had sunk to the depths that only a person who's had their nose to the dining hall glass and been allowed to watch the feast but not participate can really ever know. That's a sucky place to be, man. Believe you me. Then, out of nowhere, he offered me a slot in an upcoming anthology that another writer had vacated for some reason (still unknown to me). I jumped on it and, without going into too much detail, that began what was, to date, the most exciting and mind-wrenching period of my creative life. I got to write that story and one more for Marco and, eventually, my first published novel. If you're not a writer you'll not have a real idea of what any of this means emotionally. The word milestone is a microscopic description. Inadequate to the thing it attempts to encapsulate as E=MC2 is inadequate to describe the Theory it's come to represent. We like to claim, some of us, that everything we write is the sole property of our private creative muse, that no hand or eye was instrumental in the carving of the final distributed product that delights (or disgusts, I suppose) our fans. Not so. At least, not so in my case. Marco is that best kind of editor, in my opinion, he functions like a sort of literary ninja or, maybe, surgeon, using tiny cuts and incisions to the various drafts that shape the whole into things unplanned by the author. Things unplanned and, again, in m case, often superior. At least that's how he was with me. The 3ish years (aggregate) I worked with Marco taught me more about writing than the previous two decades combined. And that's the crux. I'm a better writer now, by far, than I was when I met him. Yeah, he did a lot to expand the STAR TREK line both in breadth and depth. Yeah, his tenure will be looked on the way we look on eras of the filmed versions of the property and that with appropriate admiration. But he made ME a better writer and that's what counts to me. He kicked ass, as they say in my neighborhood. Kicked and took names. I'm happy mine was one of them. Lucky, in fact. It's sort of selfish to say it this way, I suppose, making this thing about him about his impact on me. He's the one with the heavy load right now, after all. But the thing is, you don't really do anything that matters in life beyond leaving your mark on other people. Nothing else matters as far as I'm concerned and Marco certainly made his mark on me. There's no higher praise I think a writer can give to an editor than "You made me better." More than that, he made it look easy. I know things will work out fine in his end of the world. The wheel always turns and to be pessimistic about the turning is to waste one's intellect. An editor I know told me that once, or words to that effect. And they are true. But this is a closed chapter and I'd like to mark it. That's the most important news this week. Something else soon, I think. Happy Hols, kids. |
posted by Geoff Thorne at 11:05 PM
