I am by nature a short story writer, but short collections are difficult to sell. Taking a leaf from Ray’s The Illustrated Man I connect several of my new shorts into a novel, “The Card Game.” Fate, Chance, Destiny and Luck play cards beneath a new October moon. As the wind destroys their game and bad omens threaten. The cards begin to move. Each card and tells a tale. These stories of the now and distant future are woven together into a tale of death and hope as the night unfolds.
“The Card Game,” was accepted is being published in February 2013
I wish Ray knew. He would have been so excited for me. It was the last book of mine that I will get to share with him.
Ray did not believe in rewriting… “Throw it up in the morning and clean it up in the afternoon and get it out there,” He’d say.
Interesting though, when reading to him some of his early letters about his very first works, he talks about rewriting and rewriting… So I wonder if that was a change.
Ray insisted that he was a science fantasy writer, not a science fiction writer and he was right. He did not worry about the mechanics of space but the imagination. Though his works might be on mars or magic carousel there were finally, ultimately about us. About love, hope fear, dreams desire and death. That is why they are so universal. In his tales, his language, though poetic, was simple. His essays, though were written in a thick, scholarly style and the depth and breadth of Ray’s knowledge came through.
The problem with death, Ray Bradbury once said to me, is that “it is so damned permanent.”
There were some stories that Ray so delighted in he’d tell them again and again.
His two favorite childhood stories were of circuses. more on that later.