Back when I was doing a lot of work for DC Comics, I had the good fortune of meeting editor emeritus Julie Schwartz, the man most responsible for the resurrection of superhero comics in the late fifties and early sixties.

Julie–short for Julius–was part of the original cadre of science fiction fans in America. He went on to become, among other things, the fledgling Ray Bradbury’s literary agent. But what he did most to shape my life was revive the popularity of the superhero in America, repackaging Golden Age favorites like Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and the Atom for me and my contemporaries. Life without superhero comics…I can’t even imagine it. And it was Julie who made sure I didn’t have to.

Comic book writer Mark Waid told me to visit Julie whenever I was at DC and pry a story out of him. I took that advice as often as I could. It turned out that Adam Strange and Space Ranger were the results of a friendly competition to see who could come up with the best new space character. Ray Palmer, the Atom’s alter ego, was named after Julie’s friend, a vertically challenged pulp magazine editor. And so on.

But when I saw Julie standing in the hall at a Lunacon one evening, I didn’t approach him just to squeeze some more DC lore out of him. The guy was past eighty, after all, and it was after eleven o’clock, and I wanted to make sure he was all right. “Don’t worry about me,” he said, “I’m just waiting for my ride to say his goodnights.”

Still, I hung around to keep him company. “So where do you live?” I asked him. 

“Queens,” he told me.

“I grew up in Queens,” I said. “Whereabout?”

“Near Springfield Boulevard and Union Turnpike.”

“No way. I grew up near Springfield Boulevard and Union Turnpike. Where exactly?”

“An apartment building. It’s called Cambridge Hall.”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “I used to deliver groceries to Cambridge Hall. Which building?”

He told me. I knew a half-dozen people who lived there. 

“Julie,” I said, “do you know how lucky you are?”

“Well,” he said, “I guess you could say I was fortunate. I’ve worked at things I’ve enjoyed, even loved, for most of my life. Not too many people can say that.”

“No,” I said, “that’s not what I mean. If I’d known Julie Schwartz lived in Cambridge Hall while I was growing up, I would have been knocking on your door every day. You never would have gotten rid of me. That’s what I mean when I say you were lucky.”

Which was right about the time Julie’s ride showed up to take him home.

Julie passed away a couple of years later at the age of 88. I went to a memorial service for him. He had selected the music himself.

I’ve met lots of inspiring people. Talented people. People to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for enriching my life. 

But none to whom I owed more than Julie Schwartz.

Superheroes — and their creators — lurk in all corners of the globe.

In this case it was Bethesda, Maryland, at the SPX (Small Press Expo) comic book convention, around 1997 or so.

After hours — maybe 1 a.m. or so — I was hanging out at a party in one of the hotel rooms with my pal and comic book fan extraordinaire Tom Peters, putting back a few beers. And who should wander over but Frank Miller.

Dark Knight Returns. Sin City. Daredevil. Elektra Assassin. Ronin.

Yep. That Frank Miller.

Having known Tom for many years at that point I knew his love of comics and the various encounters he’d had, so I turned to the famed creator and said, “I’ve got a Frank Miller story for you.”

Slightly amused, Frank Miller indulged me as I queued up the scenario for Tom. For the record, I don’t remember Tom’s original Frank Miller anecdote, but I sure as heck remember what happened next.

As background … Tom is more than a comic fan. He’s a comic book aficionado. Even 20 years ago he saw comic books as a true art form, and is in a very real way a comic books scholar. He wasn’t your typical comic book ‘nerd.’

Nevertheless … as comic book fans are prone to do if they meet the creators they have come to enjoy (or even worship), Tom got into a conversation with Frank Miller about The Dark Knight Returns — and it’s inherent flaw.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

For those who haven’t read Miller’s tale, a 55-year-old Batman, in a supped-up exoskeleton, goes toe-to-toe with Superman. And Batman — being the clever and industrious crime fighter that we’ve come to know — ultimately bests an already weakened Superman using some well-timed Kryptonite (there’s far more to the plot, but I don’t want to get off track).

Tom’s contention, and one he relayed to Frank Miller, was that under any logical circumstances, Superman would crush Batman — simple physics — and the only reason Batman essentially defeated Superman was that, as the writer, Frank Miller made that choice. Miller decided that Batman would win, even though it would seem implausible, at least in theory.

(Yes, as we comic book nerds know, these conversations really do happen; not just on The Big Bang Theory).

Anyway, Frank Miller politely accepted Tom’s thesis, but explained that under the circumstances within the story, his plotting not only made sense, but paid off on multiple levels, giving the finale an epic send-off.

Tom wasn’t buying it, and finally said — in front of a room full of comic book nerds — “Okay. That’s it, Miller. You and me. Outside.”

Now … I’ve known Tom a long time. To know Tom is to love him, and also accept that he has a VERY dry sense of humor. It does take some adjusting to, but once you understand it, Tom is quite funny.

At that moment in time and space, I knew that, and Tom knew that.

But Frank Miller …?

Not so much.

So Tom’s standing there with fake fists, ready to go, the room unsure as to what’s going to happen next. Miller surveys the scene. He looks to his left. He looks to his right. He looks straight ahead. He looks to side.

Aaaaaaaand … he leaves.

My one and only time hanging out, drinking beers and talking comic books with Frank Miller, and Tom, the biggest and most sophisticated comic book fan I ever met, chased him away.

Just goes to show that even if you plot the story out perfectly in your head … sometimes it goes the other way.

I have been blessed through the years, attending conventions as a teen and getting a chance to chat with many of the greats of the day. Perhaps the first author I got to really chat with was Isaac Asimov, a perennial figure at the first few Star Trek conventions.  (It might have been, instead, David Gerrold with memory blurry as to what order I met these two.) We chatted about this and that, as you do at a convention and certainly nothing about writing.

The first time I spoke with an author about writing was Ben Bova, who came to SUNY-Binghamton in Fall 1976 to speak and since he was there as a guest of my professor, I got invited along to dinner before his talk. Bova was kind and encouraging about my interest in writing. This led to a potential job interview with Bova at Omni when I was graduating a few years later but a transit strike kept me out of Manhattan and the meeting never happened.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Theodore Sturgeon for Pipe Dream, SUNY-Binghamton’s campus newspaper, at the San Diego Comic-Con in 1978. We spent a good two hours at a bar and he was incredibly forthcoming about the craft and I was mesmerized.

Since then, I have had a series of encounters with literary and/or creative figures as I went from fan and student to professional. As a result, I was blessed to get to know many writers, producers, directors. But, this month we’re talking about our most unforgettable/inspirational meeting with one of these titans. Here, I stall because several compete with one another.

Two, though, involve houses. In 1983, I was in California and Starlog arranged for me to interview Nicholas Meyer, less about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but more about The Day After, his harrowing television miniseries that showed America what might happen should, the unthinkable become reality. He invited me to conduct the interview in his home and I got a sense of what success as a writer brings you. We talked about writing versus directing and his prose versus his filmed work, opening my eyes in many ways to the possibilities.

A few years later I was fortunate to cap a trip to San Diego with an invitation to visit the Wonderland that is Harlan Ellison’s home. While Meyer’s place was sparsely but tastefully furnished, Harlan’s house was and is a treasure trove. There are books everywhere, shelves three and four deep with books and comics and magazines. Draped over a railing were stories he was in various stages of editing for the final and still-forthcoming volume of Dangerous Visions, all ringing the desk and manual typewriter where he made words do magical things.

This was a writer’s home and it was something to envy and want for myself. Harlan and I have talked comics and life but never about writing, which is a shame. He turned 80 recently and I have no idea if we’ll ever have that chance, but his hard work and dedication to his craft have never left my thoughts.

Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?
Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
Hemingway: Getting the words right.
—Ernest Hemingway, “The Art of Fiction,” The Paris Review Interview, 1956

When asked, as I sometimes am, for “writing advise,” I usually lead with these trite bits of wisdom:

1. Write!

2. Don’t be afraid to turn out a bad first draft, because

3. Writing is actually a process of rewriting.

The first is self-explanatory. Don’t just think about writing or talk about it. Do it! The only way to learn how to write is by the doing, and the only way to do it is to do it, re-do it, then do it again and again until, as the esteemed Mr. Hemingway said, you get the words right. The first draft is the blueprint. The rewriting is the fine, detail carpentry work, if I may get all This Old House on you.

While it was me who suggested this month’s Crazy 8 blog topic–What work of yours would you go back and rewrite if you could?–I realized when I sat down to write my piece on the subject it was a case of having hoisted myself on my own petard. Because the answer is, honestly, everything. Whether it’s something I had written at the start of my publishing career in 1975 or the story I finished last week, I would, if given the opportunity, rewrite every single damned thing I’ve ever published. Of course that’s not possible, certainly not for the 1000 or so comic book stories I’ve written, or for most of the prose, fiction and non-fiction alike, that I’ve done. Most of it is in print and out of my creative control besides, having been written as “work made for hire,” meaning it’s owned and technically “authored” by the publishers who paid me to do the work in the first place.

“I have rewritten–often several times–every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, Random House, 1966

But re-reading some of my output, is if not painful, at least an effort. I often describe myself as a “retail writer,” a pen for hire. I turn out stories by the word count or the number of pages, usually on a very specific deadline, and get paid accordingly. Sometimes there’s time to rewrite; more often than not, there isn’t. The picture that heads up this post is of the bookcase where I keep what I’ve written. Even taking into account that there’s almost an entire shelf of reprints of other things on the rest of the shelves, and that I didn’t write every story in every comic book or anthology, that still represents a buttload of words. As da Vinci is supposed to have said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” If a writer didn’t “abandon,” to whatever degree of satisfaction, any single work, they would never get to the next one.

“I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times–once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.”
—Bernard Malamud, “Long Work, Short Life,” quoted in The Magic Worlds of Bernard Malamud, by Evelyn Gross Avery, SUNY Press, 2001

Which isn’t to say I’m embarrassed by these works, whether written forty years or forty days ago. I like to think I did the best I could with what I knew and the skill level I possessed at the time I wrote them. While some of the writing or ideas may make me cringe, there’s always something in it–a sentence here or there, a random chapter, a well-realized character or bit of business–that I can point to that makes it tolerable.

That being said, if I had to choose one work that I would love to have a second crack at, it would have to the 1980 novel Murdermoon featuring Spider-Man and the Hulk, the eleventh (and final) entry in Pocket Books’ Marvel Novel Series. I had written an earlier novel in the series (Spider-Man in Crime Campaign) which, considering my age and that it was the first novel I’d ever done, was an at least readable 50,000 words of pulp fiction. Murdermoon, on the other hand, doesn’t stand up under any criteria. Remember my second piece of advice above (Don’t be afraid to turn out a bad first draft)? Well, Murdermoon was certainly that…unfortunately, given the project’s tight deadline, it was also the only draft. Nowadays, thanks to computers, rewriting and revisions are easily done on the fly; before I start a day’s writing, I revisit the previous day or two’s output and do my revisions as I go along, then do a last and thorough rewrite/revision on the completed piece after I’ve typed “the end.”

But Murdermoon was written in the age of the typewriter and what little rewriting I could do was done in pencil on that first and only draft of the manuscript. There simply wasn’t time to run it through the typewritten a second time and the result shows it. The story meanders, the plot is barely coherent, and the prose even more clunky than was my wont as a twenty-five year old writer. Len Wein, one of the book’s editors along with Marv Wolfman, did single out one chapter, set in a small town where Bruce (the Hulk) Banner wakes up and thinks about perhaps settling, praising it for its Ray Bradbury-ish vibe. To this day, I think Len was being extraordinarily kind.

“I’m all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
—Truman Capote in Conversations With Capote, by Lawrence Grobel, New American Library, 1985

Murdermoon is more than half my lifetime in the past and it is and will always be what it is. And the truth is, even if I had a reason to rewrite it, it would still never be all that I want it to be. Someone asked me recently what the hardest part of writing was. I answered that it was making the words sound as good on paper as they did in my head.

I’m currently revising a collection of short stories written since the mid-90s that I plan to bring out through Crazy 8 Press in the near future, my opportunity to rewrite, update, and make better than when they were first published. Of course, every time I look at them, even those I’d already gone over again (and again) I find something else to change and hopefully improve. Pretty soon, I’ll abandon them to publication and move on to the next piece that I’ll eventually be forced to let loose in the world, ready or not.

Like this essay. Another couple of lines and the first draft will be done. Then I’ll put it aside for a bit before returning to it for the second (and third and so on) round until, even though it’s not exactly right because it never can be, I’ll post it and regretfully move on. I know the right words are out there. I just have to keep searching until I find them.

The one that got away?

The truth is there have been a great many of them. So many that as I recall them now, it feels like it’s a miracle I got any work at all. But one stands out from the rest, I think. The one about the chain of dinner theaters, which will remain nameless, and the shortsightedness of the legal profession.

About fifteen years ago, a smart, aspiring TV producer with roots in the sports broadcasting world asked me to partner up with him. You see, he had a business relationship with this chain of dinner theaters (yeah, you’ve probably guessed who they are by now) and he had a vision that this chain could be the basis for a successful reality show.

I didn’t want to write for a reality show, I told him. I wanted to do an hour-long ensemble drama based on the broadly sketched characters in the dinner theater. He liked the idea. He pitched it to the management of the chain, who liked it as well.

I wrote a script and surrounded it with a proposal, and gave it to my partner (who is still a friend—the only lasting benefit of the whole shebang). He in turn peddled it at meeting after meeting, deftly unveiling its merits for the benefit of one New York network exec after another.

And one of them bought it.

That’s right. In fact, that exec was going to make our show the first of several dramas his network planned to roll out. We rejoiced. We were going to produce a TV show.

Of course, it wasn’t just our proposal that had wowed the network. It was the success of the dinner theaters, which nationally drew more people in a given year than did the New York Yankees. Still, it was a show, right?

Then we got a call from the management of the chain. Their lawyers had chimed in. “You’ve got a successful dinner-theater business going,” said the lawyers. “Why blur the picture by tying it to a TV show. What if somebody falls off a horse and sues you? You need this headache?”

Never mind that a TV show would only vault the chain to a new level of success. The lawyers prevailed. The chain backed out. And without their immense audience, we had no leverage with the network.

In other words, we were…cooked. Yes, that’s the word we’ll use. Cooked.

A few weeks later, I’m reading Inside Star Trek, a terrific book that I heartily recommend if you haven’t read it already. In the book, Herb Solow, the head of TV production at Desilu in the early sixties, had just come back from New York with orders for two offbeat, hour-long dramas. One was Mission: Impossible, which he had sold to CBS. The other was going to NBC. It was called Star Trek.

Lucy and Desi were pleased. Then their lawyers chimed in. “You’ve got a successful half-hour sitcom business going,” said the lawyers. “Why blur the picture by bringing in hour-long dramas? What if somebody falls off a spaceship and sues you? You need this headache?”

Fortunately, Lucy and Desi overruled their lawyers and produced the hour-long shows anyway, and the rest is history. Their law firm, by the way? The same one that advised the guys at the dinner-theater chain.

The same damn one…

My latest novel, Crossline, is a scifi adventure about two men — a civilian space pilot forced through a wormhole and into a war-torn parallel Earth, and the CEO of the corporation who launched the pilot to begin with — and how their journeys intersect.

But underneath the scifi elements lies a more personal story– a trilogy, in fact — that I wrote in high school. It was my first real attempt at fiction, and, all things considered, it wasn’t half bad.

It was based on the ‘troubles’ in Ireland, which, of course, I knew absolutely nothing about, but when you’re trying to impress a girl, well … you make stuff up and hope for the best. The girl, in question, did like the stories, and she was impressed. But not so much that things went the way I wanted.

And in terms of the written material itself, here’s the real problem:

I lost them.

Or, I should say, I lost parts two and three. I wrote those stories by hand, and then typed them up, because this was back in the mid 1980s, before everything we did was on computers and saved on a hard drive. And, because, I was a putz.

I don’t remember if passed the printed pages onto to someone or I simply left them lying around somewhere, but I didn’t have the mental wattage to make copies or keep track of them. I still have the original — with the truly awful title Skies of Green — but the others are long gone.

For several years after that I tried to recreate them, to expand on that trilogy, but that original magic, even back then, was lost to me.

The core story stuck with me — I always felt I had something there — but I was never able to recapture the nuance, and improve upon it. To write a new version.

So they drifted into the ether for the better part of 20 years.

And then … I had the inspiration for Crossline — the scifi part of it anyway — and suddenly my original story had a new life.

Bringing that story full circle gave me real satisfaction, and a sense of closure.

Yet as pleased as I am with how Crossline turned out, and the excellent response I’ve been getting to it … those original missing pages are still out there somewhere.

And like the girl I was trying to impress, in some ways, those pages – and the words they contained — are the ones that got away.