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I'd like to thank Nick Mamatas, Del Howison, John Skipp, and Stephen Jones for their quotes about me and my work, read by Lisa Morton when she introduced me Saturday night.
The entire event was webcast live and will, hopefully soon, be put online but in the meantime for anyone burning with anticipation as to what I said when accepting the Life Achievement Award:
I grew up with horror, and while I was an avid and voracious reader, I sought out horror from the time I was able to choose my fictions – in novels, stories, television, and film. I grew up on the stories of Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson and Harlan Ellison, John Collier and Shirley Jackson, among the names to conjure with. I watched Twilight Zone and One Step Beyond, and I read EC comics in my father’s luncheonette in the Bronx: I couldn’t get enough of the weird, the unexpected, and the horrible.
For me, the best horror leaves a residue of unease, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve loved that feeling. I thrive on the sense, that just beneath the surface or just around the corner of our world lurks another, slightly different world –weirder and unexpected, frightening and dangerous. If I’m lucky, when a story has ended, I’ll still have that delicious sense of unease, that maybe things aren’t quite right.
The journey that took me from my father’s luncheonette to being here tonight has been a grand and unscripted adventure. After an unremarkable university career, I came to New York City, where I was fortunate enough to land a job with a mainstream publisher, and even more fortunate that, as a lowly editorial assistant, I had the opportunity to edit some works of fantasy and horror. It was only after several years, a bout of pneumonia, and a period of unemployment that I learned of the recently-founded Omni magazine, and starting haunting their offices for a job. While I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a genre editor, I needed a job and Omni sounded like an exciting place to be. That, and I wanted the opportunity to work on original fiction. The rest, as they say, is history.
I remained at Omni for seventeen years, until the magazine folded in 1998. During that time I published the first Stoker Award winning story in the Long Fiction category: “The Pear-Shaped Man” by George R. R. Martin. I also began editing the Year’s Best series, beginning in 1988, and original anthologies in 1989. When OMNI folded. I co-founded Event Horizon, a webzine that published science fiction, fantasy and horror, along with relevant nonfiction, including Douglas E. Winter’s seminal speech ‘The Pathos of Genre,’ which has become the clarion call of our field. After the demise of Event Horizon, I worked for SCIFI.COM for almost six years, and now, I’ve been editing anthologies exclusively since 2005.
Editing and writing are completely different things, favoring different types of skills and thinking. You can teach literature. You can teach basic composition, both fiction and non-fiction. I don’t think you can really teach editing or writing. Either you understand the shape of a story, the way it feels and needs to work, or you don’t. Editors and writers need one another, and it’s possible, even likely, for a person to have a visceral understanding of one, not the other. For me, editing is like filling a house with furniture. I’d know what to do with an empty house and a massive shipment from Crate and Barrel, but I couldn’t actually build an end table or even stain an armoire; it’s the writer who builds the actual objects. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with many of the best writers in the business, and frequently, I’ll feel the thrill of discovering and publishing a new and original voice.
I’d like to thank the committee that chose to honor me, my fellow members of the Horror Writers Association, the readers who have enabled me to continue to edit horror and especially all the writers who have contributed to the body of work you honor tonight. Without those writers I would literally not be up here.
The entire event was webcast live and will, hopefully soon, be put online but in the meantime for anyone burning with anticipation as to what I said when accepting the Life Achievement Award:
I grew up with horror, and while I was an avid and voracious reader, I sought out horror from the time I was able to choose my fictions – in novels, stories, television, and film. I grew up on the stories of Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson and Harlan Ellison, John Collier and Shirley Jackson, among the names to conjure with. I watched Twilight Zone and One Step Beyond, and I read EC comics in my father’s luncheonette in the Bronx: I couldn’t get enough of the weird, the unexpected, and the horrible.
For me, the best horror leaves a residue of unease, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve loved that feeling. I thrive on the sense, that just beneath the surface or just around the corner of our world lurks another, slightly different world –weirder and unexpected, frightening and dangerous. If I’m lucky, when a story has ended, I’ll still have that delicious sense of unease, that maybe things aren’t quite right.
The journey that took me from my father’s luncheonette to being here tonight has been a grand and unscripted adventure. After an unremarkable university career, I came to New York City, where I was fortunate enough to land a job with a mainstream publisher, and even more fortunate that, as a lowly editorial assistant, I had the opportunity to edit some works of fantasy and horror. It was only after several years, a bout of pneumonia, and a period of unemployment that I learned of the recently-founded Omni magazine, and starting haunting their offices for a job. While I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a genre editor, I needed a job and Omni sounded like an exciting place to be. That, and I wanted the opportunity to work on original fiction. The rest, as they say, is history.
I remained at Omni for seventeen years, until the magazine folded in 1998. During that time I published the first Stoker Award winning story in the Long Fiction category: “The Pear-Shaped Man” by George R. R. Martin. I also began editing the Year’s Best series, beginning in 1988, and original anthologies in 1989. When OMNI folded. I co-founded Event Horizon, a webzine that published science fiction, fantasy and horror, along with relevant nonfiction, including Douglas E. Winter’s seminal speech ‘The Pathos of Genre,’ which has become the clarion call of our field. After the demise of Event Horizon, I worked for SCIFI.COM for almost six years, and now, I’ve been editing anthologies exclusively since 2005.
Editing and writing are completely different things, favoring different types of skills and thinking. You can teach literature. You can teach basic composition, both fiction and non-fiction. I don’t think you can really teach editing or writing. Either you understand the shape of a story, the way it feels and needs to work, or you don’t. Editors and writers need one another, and it’s possible, even likely, for a person to have a visceral understanding of one, not the other. For me, editing is like filling a house with furniture. I’d know what to do with an empty house and a massive shipment from Crate and Barrel, but I couldn’t actually build an end table or even stain an armoire; it’s the writer who builds the actual objects. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with many of the best writers in the business, and frequently, I’ll feel the thrill of discovering and publishing a new and original voice.
I’d like to thank the committee that chose to honor me, my fellow members of the Horror Writers Association, the readers who have enabled me to continue to edit horror and especially all the writers who have contributed to the body of work you honor tonight. Without those writers I would literally not be up here.