Another week, another review

There's a new review of Voices of Vision up over at Green Man Review. It's quite a kind one, which is the kind we like the best:

Jayme Lynn Blaschke is a freelance interviewer, which earns him points for courage under fire: interviewing is not really very easy, and writers and editors are sometimes among the most difficult of subjects. Voices of Vision is a collection of Blaschke's interviews with editors, writers, and, as he calls them, "comic book creators" in science fiction and fantasy. The result is a look at a group of artists (and yes, that includes the editors, most of whom are writers themselves and who bring that sensibility to their work as editors) as varied as the twin genres themselves.

I found the interviews with the editors -- Gardner Dozois, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Stanley Schimdt, Gordon Van Gelder, and Scott Edelman -- the most exciting for reasons that I can't quite explain. Call it the editor in my own makeup, or maybe it's just my conviction that these are the people who are molding the literature: the stories they select for publication are the ones that influence the next round of stories, because for all intents and purposes, these stories are what other writers are looking at and reacting to.

....

What is most engaging about this book is that it is a glimpse at the belly of the beast, so to speak -- science fiction and fantasy as a business, a discipline, a means of livelihood, and a community. Writers are not the only ones fascinated by how other writers work, and I think anyone who reads science fiction or fantasy (or both) is interested in how and why editors make the decisions they do. Blaschke is an engaging interviewer and has obviously done his homework on each subject -- the questions are specific, pertinent, and invite elaboration, and each interview begins with a short introduction detailing the circumstances (including the information that those with Gardner Dozois and Gordon Van Gelder were first published in Green Man Review.)

All the positive reviews I've garnered thus far--coupled with the not-disastrous royalty statement from a couple of weeks back--have convinced me that the time is ripe to start general preliminary work on compiling a follow-up volume (subtitle: Everything I Have Left in the Files). Perhaps, if things remain somewhat stable in my life, I will have a manuscript to send in to Nebraska by December or January.

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