What Mad Universe (Jerry eBooks) by Fredric Brown

Author:Fredric Brown [Brown, Fredric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jerry eBooks
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

But now, with five years of editing under his belt, he thought he could do better at it than he had before. He could see now what a lot of his mistakes had been— laziness among them. And the laziness, at least, was curable.

Besides, this time he had plots to start with—the plots of all of the unsold stories he could remember. He thought he could do better with them now than he had five years ago, a lot better.

He went through magazine after magazine, skimming all the stories, reading some of them. It got dark and the black blankness of the mist-out pressed against the pane of his window but he kept reading.

One thing became increasingly obvious to him—he couldn’t and didn’t dare try to place stories in a setting with which he was as unfamiliar as he was with the world about him. He’d make mistakes, little mistakes, that would give him away, things that would show his unfamiliarity with the little details of life here.

Fortunately that left him two fields. From his reading of Wells’ Outline of History he knew that the differences here all dated from those vanishing sewing machines of 1903. On any story—adventure, love or what have you—-written as a costume piece and placed before 1903, he was on sure ground. Luck, too, he’d been a history major at college and was pretty familiar with the subject— particularly American history.

He noticed with satisfaction that the love and adventure magazines both carried a fair percentage of costume pieces—more than the love and adventure magazines of where he’d come from. Possibly because there was a wider difference here between life of a hundred or two hundred years ago and life of today, the settings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seemed more romantic and interesting.

Even the love pulps—he was both surprised and satisfied to learn—carried historical stories, love tales put in Civil War, Revolutionary War and pioneer settings.

The other field he could tackle was, of course, pure fantasy. He’d bought only one fantasy magazine but he’d seen that there were others on the stands. And in pure fantasy—or semi-science-fiction adventures in far and non-existent galaxies—he couldn’t go wrong. Nor in stories of the distant future. As long as he avoided the present, the recent past and the near future, he’d be all right.

He finished his study of the magazines by ten o’clock and, from then until midnight, he sat at the little desk in his room, pencil m hand and paper before him, jotting down notes of all the stories he could remember having written and not sold. He was able to remember twenty stories.

Of the twenty, six had been historical costume pieces and those were in—particularly the shorter ones that he could re-write comparatively quickly. Another six he picked out as being fairly easy to translate into historical or fantastic settings.

A dozen stories, then, to start on, as soon as he could get hold of a typewriter—if he could sell one or two of them quickly, he’d be all right.

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