In the Deadlands Read Free Page B

little thought exists between the final exclamation point and the SEND button.
    Good writing rarely occurs in the first draft—great books aren’t written; they’re rewritten . That the words look good on the page doesn’t guarantee they’re worth reading. The Selectric taught me that. Removing the need to retype a sloppy page can also deny the writer themandate, the opportunity, the possibility of learning from the second look, the third, and the fourth as well.
    Learning to pay attention to the words, the sentences, the paragraphs—that personal self-awareness of the linguistic decision—that, I think, is the skill that good writers ultimately achieve and consistently demonstrate. It is what the skilled writer aspires to accomplish every time he sits down at the keyboard.
    It is also a possibility that the computer can encourage. A good word processing program lets you skip easily through your text, lets you find occurrences of words and phrases, lets you revisit your work as many times as necessary. It’s no longer a stack of finished pages—regardless of the length, the totality remains a work in progress until you hit the PRINT button. (In fact, you may never hit the PRINT button at all. A lot of text never hits paper until several editors have gone over it and the publisher hits the PRINT button.)
    See, here’s the thing. Writing can’t be taught—it can only be learned. And it can only be learned by paying attention to what you write—by watching not only the words on the page, but the person who’s typing them, looking to see where all those strange thoughts and uncomfortable experiences are coming from, and ultimately learning how to tap into that far-deeper source that fuels the passion.
    The learning process isn’t linear—it’s a series of plateaus, a punctuated equilibrium of personal evolution. A writer’s chronological history isn’t a journey as much as it’s a vertical cross section of his or her life. Like the rings of a tree, it’s a measure of growth and pause, fertility and patience.
    This book is one of the rings of my life.
    Looking back from this perspective, it’s clear that most of these stories are about relationships—mostly about how they break down. And that too is an accurate reflection of the time and the author.
    Later on, however—
    But that’s a different collection.
    â€” David Gerrold

With a Finger in My I
    For the record, I was not doing drugs before, during, or after I wrote this story.
    It started as a dream—I dreamt I was looking in a mirror. I saw no pupil in my left eye. Or was it my right? Hard to tell. The mirror reversed everything.
    When I woke up, the dream was still with me, so I sat down at my desk and started typing.
    It wasn’t a story. It wasn’t even half a story. It had no meaning at all. It was just a stream of vaguely connected sentences where everything was taken so literally that all sense disappeared.
    Then about six pages in, I got to a point where I didn’t know what came next, so I put it in the drawer and forgot about it.
    A year or two later, Harlan Ellison began assembling stories for Again, Dangerous Visions, a sequel to his landmark anthology, Dangerous Visions . He rejected the one I thought he should buy (more about that later), so I dug out my weird little dream and added a Lewis Carroll ending to it.
    He bought it. This is it.
    When I looked in the mirror this morning, the pupil was gone from my left eye. Most of the iris had disappeared too. There was just a blank white area and a greasy smudge to indicate where the iris had previously been.
    At first I thought it had something to do with the contact lenses, but then I realized that I don’t wear lenses. I never have.
    It looked kind of odd, that one blank eye staring back at me, but the unsettling thing about it was that I could still see out of it. When I put my hand over my good