What is a Shaggy Dog Story?

You ask, "What is a shaggy dog story?" and this brings to mind the years I spent as a janitor in a pickle factory. These were extraordinary pickles, the world's largest, cultivated in vats the size of zeppellin sheds and salted by cascades of water the size of Niagara, drawn from the nearby sea. As you can imagine, the combination of salt and pickle matter led to some challenging clean-ups, and in this I was aided by a series of books written by Marceau de Savon, famed cleanser to royalty and hygiene-advisor to the stars. The books were first-rate, as all the reviews testified (even Gore Vidal was impressed), but their great limitation became evident when I failed to discover the word "pickle" in the index. To make a long story short, I was forced to improvise, and eventually learned that the best way to clean up the residue of a pickle factory was to use the leftover dough from the hamburger bun factory next door. But to answer your question --  I've no idea.

With Razor Eyes

Sometimes I stare at what I've typed, and wonder how James Blish, Damon Knight, or Joanna Russ would have torn it apart. Then I understand that I can only go forward if I read with razor eyes.

To The Darkling Sky By Die-Lon Drive!

Yesterday, the pharmacist called me "Monsieur DIE-Lon."

Her mispronunciation embarrassed her, but I thought it was a great, forceful name. I'm going to scream it out the next time I leap from a skyscraper and soar into the starry welkin.

Revision

I love to revise.

Writing a first draft can be like hurtling down a mountainside, on a bike without brakes; but revision is the quiet contemplation of sound, rhythm, and meaning, the calm quest for the right words.

All the same, I can't enjoy a meal before I cook it.

Escape Does Not Work

From "Books," by Joanna Russ, in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1979:

It isn't the realists who find life dreadful. It's the romancers. After all, which group is trying to escape from life? Reality is horrible and wonderful, disappointing and ecstatic, beautiful and ugly. Reality is everything. Reality is what there is. Only the hopelessly insensitive find reality so pleasant as to never want to get away from it. But painkillers can be bad for the health, and even if they were not, I am damned if anyone will make me say that the newest fad in analgesics is equivalent to the illumination which is the other thing (besides pleasure) art ought to provide. Bravery, nobility, sublimity, and beauty that have no connection with the real world are simply fake, and once readers realize that escape does not work, the glamor fades, the sublime aristocrats turn silly, the profundities become simplifications, and one enters (if one is lucky) into the dreadful discipline of reality and art, like "The Penal Colony"....

There is no pleasure like finding out the realities of human life, in which joy and misery, effort and release, dread and happiness, walk hand-in-hand.

We had better enjoy it. It's what there is.