LORE Chats with Barry Longyear

Barry B. Longyear is the first writer to win the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Award all in the same year. In addition to his acclaimed Enemy Mine Series, his works include the Circus World and Infinity Hold series, Sea of Glass, other SF & fantasy novels, recovery and writing instruction works, and numerous short stories.

In your seminar, The Write Stuff, we get to find out why you started writing. Can you identify the point where you truly felt that you conquered those goals? The point at which you felt you „had arrived?“

There have been several times when I felt I had arrived: When I sold my first story to George Scithers at Asimov’s in 1978, when I became the first writer to win the Nebula, Hugo, and John W. Campbell Awards in the same year, when I first saw books of mine on the shelves at a local bookstore, and just about every time someone writes in to tell me what something I’ve written has meant to them.  Then there are all the times when I beat myself up as a failure, not making the big bucks, not getting the book sales and placements I think I deserve, and so on. This is the kind of stuff that can give you a heart attack. I finally had to settle on writing as the goal because writing is what I love doing, whether it sells or not, and that no one really „arrives“ until they drop you in that box and throw dirt on you. As it has been said many times before, „The joy is in the journey.“