"K. W. Jeter - Seeklight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jeter K. W)

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Seeklight by K.W. Jeter
INTRODUCTION TO SEEKLIGHT
In the mail the other morning, from an unpublished writer a
little to the west of here, came a letter which took me back ten
years to the living room of 143 Avondale Place, Syracuse, New
York, where I, the then Schubert Foundation Playwriting Fellow,
was trying to push my failing Dodge and beginning marriage on
an income of $250.00 a month while simultaneously applying
myself to collected works which then might have numbered all of
one hundred and fifty pages.

The Writer (from the west of here that is; I no longer live at
Avondale Place) wanted to know what the truth of getting
started in publishing was. How did you sell a story? Was it really
true as it appeared to him that you had to have connections to
place your work? How did writers get going anyway? Was it
possible to do your work and mail it out and get in print or did
you need contacts? What contacts, anyway? He was pretty
discouraged, the young writer went on, but not ready to give up
yet. Perhaps I had some suggestions. Markets? Contacts?

Back to the living room in Syracuse where the same questions
rattled through my mind and corpus for almost a full year. It is
possible that the subculture of professionally published novelists,
poets and short-story writers is not a cabal to be achieved only
through dark rites of initiation-and-persecution but if this is so,
you could not have proven it by me in the academic year of
1964-5, a feeling which to a certain degree persists emotionally
even to this day. How indeed does one break into this business?
How can one emerge from the mass of unpublished writers to
professional publication? What is the secret?
 It is not easy to break into this business and my
correspondent from Philadelphia was right, it does appear from
the outside as if it were a mysterious cabal with equally
mysterious but rigorous social customs; one becomes a writer
only by becoming personally acceptable to a formal or less formal
board of review. It does little good to advise that this is not the
case; that while the medium of the literary novel and short-story
is closed nearly tight nowadays, insular and self-limiting, the
category market—gothics, westerns, mysteries and particularly
science-fiction—remain open to those who can meet the rather
stringent requirements of the categories and that science-fiction