Farewell, Dan Simmons

We lost a modern literary giant this late February when Dan Simmons passed away. Dan and his work meant a great deal to me. Actually, Dan Simmons was the most important writer in my life. I’ll tell you why, if you hang around for a few. Was he always my favorite author? Not always, but often he was. Do I unabashedly love all his books? No, but I deeply love at least six of them and there are two or three that simply take one’s breath away, even after the fourth of fifth reading.

Look, rankings like this are silly. Favorite authors, books, movies, songs. I stopped trying to compile top 5 and top 10 lists a long time ago (there are too many novels to love and compare). But Dan wrote at least three of my very favorite novels of all time. And he wrote the one that made me decide at age 19—after much deliberation, fear, depression, and cluelessness about what to do with myself—to commit to becoming a writer. I’ll get to that particular book in a moment. And yet, the books themselves are probably not the main reason the man was so important to me, or such a critical fulcrum in my slow, painful, Orc-emerging-from-the-mud-of-Mordor-like development from a high school dropout to a published author (and an internationally bestselling one at that, pardon the brag).

No, the real reason he became so important to me is that Dan Simmons was a phenomenal teacher. First as an elementary school teacher who was recognized by the State of Colorado as one of its very best, and by the many of his students who credited him with being the reason they came to love reading and writing. But even when he retired from teaching to write full time, Dan remained an incredible teacher. He didn’t have to keep teaching through his work and to those of us writers who came to know him a little. But he did. I think he couldn’t help but teach or at least try to teach us.

Dan taught through his novels, the writing lessons were inside his prose and his characters. In Summer of Night, his beautiful and very scary coming of age horror novel, one of his child characters, an undiagnosed genius who is also an aspiring writer, observes that when writing a story, describing a character by comparing them to a famous person—he looked like James Bond without the suit, for example—is lazy. I remember reading that for the first time and thinking, pay attention here, Simmons is giving you a free lesson. His work is filled with other, more subtle lessons, tips, and truisms about writing. But mostly Simmons let his prose do the teaching.

Dan also taught through the forum he ran on his website for many years, where he tirelessly discussed writing, publishing, poetry, and many other topics with anyone who cared to visit the forum (and participate respectfully). I spent years at that online hub, primarily between 2004 and 2010 or 2011, amazed that a writer of Dan’s stature would open the clubhouse door for hungry, malformed pups like me. I can say with total confidence that the years I spent interacting with Dan and other bright minds on his forum—discussing what makes literature great, what makes writing work, how the publishing wheels really turn, how to analyze the great works of literature, how to spot the lazy flaws in your average bestseller, discussing (as an unofficial book club) James Dickey’s Deliverance for weeks that stretched into months, debating every aspect of writing but never, ever having Dan critique our own writing, only our thoughts, for this was never a writing workshop, only a very rare and amazingly special classroom—that all I learned during my time in Dan’s digital clubhouse was the equivalent of an MFA in Literature (or as Dan might have it, Writing Well).

No, really. For someone who was too much of a screw up to properly finish high school, took his GED, then spent three miserable years at Colorado State University before deciding to strike out on my own, the hard and ill-advised way, Dan’s forum became my degree program, my Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and one of the essential springboards one needs to make the leap from aspiring author to published one.

But let me back up for a moment, because I’m realizing, with not a little sadness, that some of you reading this might not really know Dan’s work. The breadth, scale, and quality of his work and the worlds he gave us. And you really should know that before hearing about my relationship to that work and to the man who performed it.

Dan and his body of work should require no introduction, but for some reason an introduction or recap has too-often been necessary over the years as I have raved about his work to others. Maybe it’s because of his not-flashy, not-made-for-prime-time name, Dan Simmons. His real name is Daniel, but he told us he chose Dan for his books because he felt that it better reflected the clean, honest, humble, solid prose he always aspired to before aspiring to sales numbers or the kind of elegant literary style that screams look at me. Dan always preferred to discuss other, better authors’ work over his own, but I remember a time or two that he used an Amish table as a metaphor for his prose. Purposefully crafted, level, all lines square, built to last for generations. Beautiful to those who know what they’re looking at.

I think that works, but an Amish table doesn’t account for the sheer vision of the world-building Dan did, or the occasions in his stories when a sentence or two somehow manages to roll by with near-perfect functional form lacking ornate or baroque flourishes of language while still glowing like a handful of otherworldly jewels. Take, for instance, this passage from The Hollow Man, where the author describes a man and a woman, who happen to be telepaths and will soon become husband and wife, meeting for the first time, at a cocktail party:

Bremen was just inside the door—someone had pressed a drink in his hand—when suddenly he had sensed another mindshield quite near him. He had put out a gentle probe, and immediately Gail’s thoughts had swept across him like a searchlight in the dark.

Both were stunned. Their first reaction had been to increase the strength of their mindshields, to roll up like frightened armadillos. Each soon found that useless against the unconscious and almost involuntary probes of the other. Neither had ever encountered another telepath of more than primitive, untapped ability. Each had assumed that he or she was a freak—unique and unassailable. Now they stood naked before each other in an empty place. A second later, almost without volition, they flooded each other’s mind with a torrent of images, self-images, half memories, secrets, sensations, preferences, perceptions, hidden shames, half-formed longings, and fully formed fears. Nothing was held back. Every petty cruelty committed, sexual experiment experienced, and prejudice harbored poured out along with thoughts of past birthday parties, former lovers, parents, and an endless stream of trivia. Rarely had two people known each other as well after fifty years of marriage.

A minute later they met for the first time.

Come on, right? Look at what Simmons pulls off here. Setting aside the fact that these characters are telepaths, the basic elements of a romantic encounter unfold. The recognition from across the room, the emotional walls that immediately go up, then come down. Then it becomes a relationship at hyper-speed, the fact that they are telepaths and can read each other strips their defenses away and they are totally naked, totally intimate, instantly awash in each other’s life histories, their personalities, flaws and all.

We recognize the moment because it’s one we’ve all experienced to some degree, the way we lock eyes with someone new, protective at first, the opening ourselves to the possibility, amazed by what we have in common, and then the ways we get to know them over the long haul, and somewhere in between we fall in love. And I just love this line, Each had assumed that he or she was a freak—unique and unassailable. The first part, assuming one’s freak-ness, is relatable because we all feel a little bit out of place in the world until we meet that person who truly gets us because they have felt out of place too, but in a specific enough way for us to feel it. Think of two young adults who are both children of divorced parents. And not just divorced, but perhaps abusive. And at least one was an alcoholic. There’s a level of specificity involved that makes us think, yes, this person really knows what it was like.

But the kicker here is what comes after the em dash—unique and unassailable. What is this really saying? If Simmons had left this off, the sentence would still stand on its own and achieve most of what he set out to achieve with it. It’s a two-parter. Unique is similar to freak but less harsh. In fact, it’s a little precious, isn’t it? We all want to be unique, and perhaps we are in some small ways. But with seven billion souls roaming the planet, how unique can we really be? But I think Simmons adds unique here to make the transition, reaffirming the alone-ness that Jeremy and Gail share. So we come to the last word, unassailable. This is very interesting because it’s the least expected descriptor. By definition, unassailable means unable to be attacked, questioned, or defeated. Unassailable is often used to convey strength of position, in absolute terms. So Jeremy and Gail, because of their condition, that of being telepaths, and who have never met another, have felt themselves to be unique in their freakish condition, and—here is where I am extrapolating—resigned to their fates. They cannot conceive of ever meeting someone like them, and therefore have been living their lives convinced they will forever be alone, or alone in the most important ways.

The metaphors here are light touch but spot on: Bremen probing gently, almost as a first gesture, putting himself out there at a party; Gail’s thoughts sweeping over him like a searchlight in a dark room (she’s cautious yet looking for something, this feels lonely); the armadillos rolling up. And then, once they realize their defenses are useless, they give in (as we do when we really open ourselves to love), and everything about them is revealed, there’s simply no room for the long courtship, this is going down, and then add in the fact that they are the only other telepaths each has ever met, there really is no other choice. That quick, they are as husband and wife of fifty years.

Can you imagine feeling this lost and alone, convinced it will be this way for the rest of your life? Of course you can. Because we’ve all felt that to some degree, until we meet the one. But this is next-level freak/alone because of the telepath condition. But then, it is also this condition which makes possible the insanely rapid courtship, the flooding of knowledge and intimacy, creating a fifty-year marriage in a few seconds.

              This is a beautiful scene, as romantic as any I have encountered in fiction, but the speculative-fiction element of telepathy—how it works, how it works in this context, this kind of moment—is at once grounded in the functionality of their paranormal talent and the quite common human emotions of two people meeting at a party and discovering a mutual attraction based on what they have in common. Simultaneously, as this scene occurs relatively early in the novel, Simmons is helping us learn how their telepathy works, he is showing us what made Jeremy and Gail Bremen’s marriage utterly unique, this insane level of intimacy literally from first sight, all of which is helping us understand why Jeremy is so shattered in the wake of Gail’s death, which happens to unfold in the first chapter.

And here we come to what the scene really achieves. It uses a speculative genre trope, telepathy, to incredible—and profoundly humane—effect. And this is what makes Dan Simmons Dan Simmons. This is what the author achieved time and time again throughout his career. He worked in various genres and employed familiar tropes while always making those genres work in service of his characters, their humanity, and our own.

Be honest—how many horror, SF, romance, fantasy, or crime novels have you found entertaining but in no way genuinely moving? How many of their characters have you forgotten within a few months of finishing the book? Too many genre works function as literature’s version of pop music. Some stick with us, but most of even the catchy tunes simply lack soul.  

              I could go on for pages analyzing The Hollow Man or any number of beautiful passages in Dan’s books, but my intent here was just to give a sample of the craft, human insight, and uncanny ways in which the author uses a genre element to turn a scene we have encountered hundreds of times before in books and movies into something we have never seen before, and which makes us feel.

Back to the big picture. For those who aren’t familiar with the works of Dan Simmons, here’s a brief yet inadequate summary. He published around 30 books, mostly novels and collections of short fiction. His work spans horror, science fiction (SF is permissible but you never dared to call it “sci-fi” around Dan; he and his mentor-friend Harlan Ellison despised the way that shorthand looked too much like skiffy and recalled the low-end pulp science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s), mainstream literary, historical fiction, hardboiled crime, a few novels we could call pure thrillers or suspense…I’m sure there are more genre labels we could apply, but then, Dan never cared much for labels, or strict genre conventions, often hopping from genre to the next, much to his publishers’ dismay.

But the thing is, across all these genres Dan worked in, he went big and kicked serious ass. He won awards in most of them. Multiple Hugos, Bram Stokers, a World Fantasy Award (for what was more of a horror novel, Song of Kali, his first novel), and more than I can recall. Many of the top names (best and most recognized writers) in these genres praised Dan’s books. And that’s one of the many writing-publishing truths Dan reminded me of many times, that you know you have arrived when the real writers and most respected names in their fields tell you so.

Stumbling across a new Dan Simmons novel often went something like this: Oh, Dan has a new book, awesome. What in the hell genre did he decide to tackle this time? The Crook Factory? A historical fiction concerning Hemingway’s misadventures in Cuba featuring Papa’s amateur spy ring chasing German U-boats while being spied upon himself by the FBI…what in the hell is the author of Hyperion and Carrion Comfort doing with all this historical stuff…oh look, now he’s being compared to Graham Greene, with praise of all these other hugely respected “spy” novelists and historical fiction household names. I was going to buy the book anyway but yeah, okay, now I’m going straight home to lock myself indoors all night.

Dan enjoyed multiple bestsellers, but writing a bestselling novel was never his first, second, or even likely his third motivation. If it had been, he would have caved in to that editor he had back in the early days who, after Dan had published a couple of exceptional, award-winning horror novels, wanted to mold him into the next Dean Koontz. Dan, of course, was having none of that. He wrote where his muse took him. You might have wondered if he was going down a list of genres, checking them off after delivering a home run in that one, and then onto the next. If I recall, his single bestselling title (or at least the one that charted highest) was probably The Terror, which went top 10 or so on the NY Times list and was adapted into a very good series on AMC.

I repeat all this to suggest that Dan Simmons should have been a household name, he should have been a “famous author,” but in reality he wasn’t. Successful? Oh yes, massively successful by the standards of respected and financially stable. But most people underestimate what it takes to be a famous writer. 99% of writers, even those who become upper-middle class or even outright wealthy, are not famous. Never mind the literary names who have been canonized (Hemingway was FAMOUS in his own time and remains so today). In the modern publishing world, there is a stratosphere with names like King, Grisham, George Martin, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, Toni Morrison…big names, recognizable on the street. That’s fame. But hell, even Joyce Carol Oates, who has published 50+ books, won all kinds of awards, crossed multiple genres, who has by any standard built an incredible career and earned every dollar…is Joyce Carol Oates really famous? Would you recognize her walking down the street? Can you name 6 of her titles? Most folks probably can’t.

Maybe what I’m trying to say is that I have grown tired of having to explain myself when people ask who my favorite authors are, and one of the first names I mention is Dan Simmons, and they ask, who’s that? It’s difficult not get at least a little down when one thinks about all the non-writer people whose fame and paycheck is 100 times the size of their talent while a writer of Dan’s caliber and voluminous contributions, or Harlan Ellison’s, or so many others, is less recognized than, say, a sitcom star from a show that aired on TNT for a few seasons back in the early ‘00s. But this is an old gripe.

Not many writers understood the difficulty of achieving immortality as an author or even producing works that might remain in print for more than a few decades, better than Dan did. It was a subject he reminded us aspiring authors of time and again. There are authors who were massive bestsellers in the 1960s or 1980s, authors who won awards or produced 50+ novels, and they are out of print today, their names unrecognizable to most of the reading public.

Dan was never really chasing money or fame, but I do know that he cared deeply about his craft and sought to create works that would endure. He had no illusions about being in print or remembered 100 years from now—or at least that was not something he expressed to us—but that was the standard he believed all of us should reach for. It wasn’t about being considered one of the greats or fame or money. It was about attempting to create something of lasting quality, something that would appeal not just to the moment, a trend, a decade in which this or that genre was big, but for generations. And the only path to creating such a work, Dan reminded us, was through the writing itself.

Talent commands, Dan liked to say. The rest was not so important.

Did Simmons write anything that will be read by future generations? That will be held in high regard 25, 50, or 100 years from now? I believe he did. Carrion Comfort, Hyperion, The Terror—these three novels tower above their genres, that make 99% of everything else in those genres seem about as enduring as Wonder Bread, and should endure as examples of the very best of what the genre is capable of. As literature. But only time will tell.

Still, none of this is why Dan Simmons was and always will be the most important writer in my life. To really understand why, we have to go back to the 1980s. I was born in 1972, and I didn’t really begin reading for pleasure until I was about 11 or 12. I discovered Stephen King when I was in 6^th grade, and my teacher was also a fan, so I had someone to discuss what I understood and didn’t understand about Cujo and Pet Sematary back then. Horror was absolutely my gateway drug to reading on my own, without assignment, for pure pleasure.

In my early teens, I branched out to all the big names in horror during that magical 80s/90s time frame. Clive Barker, Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, Poppy Z Brite, and so many others. Soon horror led to science fiction, fantasy, mainstream suspense, and yes, eventually the literary classics. By the time I was out of high school and trying to figure out what to major in at CSU, I was deeply interested in learning what it took to become a published author. Not ready to declare myself a writer, I was reading a lot of books on how to write and how to get published, because honestly, I had no idea how such things even happened.

This is the time when I began to pay more attention to the subtle distinctions in the blurbs often plastered on the books being published. Quotes from big newspapers or critics versus those from writers I had never heard of. Rave reviews from the likes of Stephen King always sold me the book, of course. But I was tuning-in more to the kind of things these blurbs said, the phrasing, the differences between a “page-turner” and a “modern horror classic,” or say, the difference between a genre work that even literary minds were getting behind and those that simply sold a lot of copies. I began to gravitate more toward authors whose blurbs featured words like “craft” or “important work of…” or “elevated prose” or “rises above the genre” or “writer’s writer” more than I was picking up books that promised another sleepless night. I was looking for novels that were exceptionally well written, not just great stories, because I needed to understand the difference and use such books to pave the road of my own development as a reader and, perhaps eventually, a writer.

In this reading mindset I happened upon a mass market paperback of a novel with the strange title of Carrion Comfort, by Dan Simmons, an author I had never heard of. The book was a brick, some 1000+ pages in mass market, which I noted would last me a while if it turned out to be something I really liked. Quality and quantity of reading time per dollar was a real factor back when I was making about $7 per hour. I could barely afford to buy one new book per week. But its size was not what sold me on Carrion Comfort. It was that it had won the Bram Stoker Award for best horror novel. It was also the blurbs from Koontz and King and other names praising Simmons and this book as the real thing. I don’t recall if this blurb appeared on that early edition of Carrion Comfort or on a later edition, but at some point Stephen King called it one of the one of the three finest horror novels ever written. Wait, what? And this was a novel about mind vampires, not blood suckers, and it had something to do with the Holocaust…Good God. An epic saga of good vs evil…Take my money, please.

Not only that, the blurbs for Dan’s epic novel about mind vampires and the blurbs referencing his other novel, the World Fantasy Award-winning Song of Kali, were very different than the blurbs one saw for most other horror writers. Dan was being called a craftsman, a writer’s writer, a once in a generation talent. His genre work displayed all the marks of genuine, capital L-Literature.

Well, I read Carrion Comfort and then everything else by Dan Simmons I could find. Hyperion, Song of Kali. There wasn’t a lot else, yet, but I hunted down Prayers for Broken Stones, a collection of his short stories, in hardcover, in a Waldenbooks at the Crossroads Mall in Boulder, no less, and holy shit it was signed!

Prayers for Broken Stones is the collection that also contains an introduction by Harlan Ellison, the one where Ellison describes how he discovered Dan Simmons. And this introduction alone is worth the price of the hardcover (which is not something I have ever said about any introduction). The story of how Ellison recognized Dan’s talent from the short story he brought to the workshop Harlan was leading is simply the stuff of legend. Dan’s story, The River Styx Runs Upstream, is also the first story in the collection, and it is a terrifying, heartbreaking wonder that’s impossible to forget. When you read it and consider it was Dan’s workshop story, before he’d ever been published, you understand exactly what Ellison meant when he said that fateful day, “Dan Simmons, you are a writer.”

I’m not sure if I realized it then, purchasing this signed copy of Prayers for Broken Stones, or if I had seen it in his bio before then, but this is the really fucking big deal thing I discovered about Dan Simmons…

He lived in Longmont, Colorado.

Hold the fort. Stop the train. Back up a minute, fella.

You’re telling me there is a literary-horror-science-fiction writer, one who has been anointed by no less than Stephen King and Harlan Ellison and Dean Koontz, one who by most accounts may be one of the most visionary, most literary, most bestest-choose-your-accolade, award-winning, genre-spanning, authors in the entire world…and he lives in Longmont, Colorado? The in-no-way exciting but perfectly fine little town 15 minutes from my hometown of Boulder, Colorado?

Folks, this just didn’t happen. I never imagined one of these heavyweights living near me. Big-time authors were as remote as Gods to me back then. They lived in Maine, New York, Europe, New Orleans, Paris…not Longmont, practically in my backyard.

This was also the first time it occurred to me to find out if an author I liked ever held any events near me. Lo and behold, I started seeing notices in the local bookstores. Dan Simmons would be doing an author event to discuss and sign copies of his new book, The Hollow Man, next Wednesday at the such and such newsstand on Main St. in Longmont. It wasn’t even a real bookstore, just a little newsstand, the kind that sold tobacco, magazines (probably a few “men’s” magazines), newspapers, and candy. But it was in Longmont, and though it was on a weekday, at lunchtime, and I had a full-time job working at McGuckin Hardware in Boulder, I calculated it would take me 20 minutes to drive each way, and if I hurried and didn’t linger, I could probably get my copy of The Hollow Man by Dan Simmons actually signed by Dan Simmons. And I might actually meet him. Good Lord, I might even get to talk to him.

My manager said I could take an hour and a half. Or two, whatever. He understood this was a big deal for me.

And here we come to the other reason this author event was such a big deal to me. See, I mentioned The Hollow Man there as if it were just another book by Dan Simmons. But it was much more than that, in part because of where I was at this time. I was 19 and strongly suspected that I would choose writing as my career path because it was all I could think about and the only career I could realistically see myself committing to, and because it was in my estimation the coolest fucking job anyone could possibly have. But I was also completely unsure, timid, adrift. I was looking for a reason to commit to writing, in my heart if nowhere else. I wanted badly to plant my flag, but I was terrified to do so.

I was also about to leave Colorado State University, because I was unhappy there, even in my literature classes. I was broke, it was winter, and I was living in an old house with no heat, with three other guys, and I had no girlfriend, and I had no direction, and I was probably diagnosable as depressed, and I was definitely inert, frozen inside, looking for that axe to break the ice, the one Kafka meant when he said, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” I didn’t know that’s what I was looking for, of course, but I was.

It was a weekday and I had about $40 to my name. I was in Waldenbooks again, at the mall in Boulder, and I checked for something new from Dan Simmons, and there it was. The Hollow Man. It was much slimmer than Carrion Comfort, only about 300 pages. And it was so new it was only available in hardcover. But oh what a cover! It was gorgeous, a saturated teal blue with an illustration of a young man holding a seashell, within which seemed to be a universe of stars, and all around him and the seashell universe were the flowing locks of a woman’s hair, all of this in rich aquamarine. It was one of the most beautiful book covers I had ever seen. On the back was yet another blurb from Stephen King. This one said The Hollow Man read like a collaboration between Thomas Harris (Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon) and Pete Dexter (whose work I did not know at the time, but this blurb alone would lead me to Paris Trout and the rest of Dexter’s books), that this was an utterly original, terrifying SF-Horror mash-up…yes, yes, take my money again, take $20 of my last $40, please.

I drove back to Ft. Collins that night and locked myself in my cold bedroom. I think this was February. I had a shitty little futon on the hardwood floor of this old house, and I had purchased a military surplus parka to sleep in, the kind worn by the Antarctic scientists in John Carpenter’s The Thing, because it was only $50 and kept me warm. So I bundled up and told my roommates to leave me alone, tonight was not a drinking night, it was a reading night, and I did not want to be disturbed. Then I opened The Hollow Man and fell under a deep, deep spell.

I read very slowly. Not only because this was a shorter book and I needed it to last, but because I sensed from the moment I had spotted it, this was going to be a special book, a special reading experience for me. So I read slowly, digesting every sentence, savoring every chapter. And in truth it was a book that I needed to read slowly, because while the prose was fluid and clear, and the story was unputdownable from page one, the ideas it contained were heavy, deep, filled with science and questions of mortality, with physics and music and math, with loss and love and horror, pain and suffering for adults and one very unique child, all of it weighing on you like a dark dream, hypnotizing you down a long dark corridor that was ethereal, mysterious, vast, like floating away in outer space, pushing your mind to places it had not gone before, encouraging you to slow down and ponder the nature of reality, the very fabric of the universe (and God!) every few pages. It was a fucking trip, man. Like being on drugs except this was just one man’s imagination. It was also a truly piercing love story between this man who was a telepath, and he had lost his wife, who was also a telepath, and he was careening across the country in his grief, pulled as if by a celestial forces into the evil schemes of some of the worst people one could imagine. It was a variation on Dante’s Inferno, I think, one that was barreling into the heart of the universe, literally, on a quantum level, into the nature of reality, life, death, and human connection.

The Hollow Man was a shattering reading experience. I cried more than once. I was terrified every 50 pages or so. I felt incredibly close to these characters, involved. Spellbound, in the literal sense. It was the purest of pure dream-state reading experiences I had ever known, and that I have ever had. I doubt there will be another like it. I was up all night, reading from about 10pm until about 5am. It was just that book for me, the one you may have found, a book that finds you at just the right time, in the right place, and you devote yourself completely to it because the book earns that from you, and you live inside of it, and you come to love the characters, you never want to leave this world, and this book, whatever it was for you—Lonesome Dove, The Stand, East of Eden, Shogun, The Hobbit, The Count of Monte Cristo—it tattoos you, you will reread it again and again, you will keep discovering more in it, and it will live inside you always.

The Hollow Man was that book for me, and it was the book which—when I finished it and slowly closed it and set it in my lap and sat in silence for an hour more, thinking yes, yes, this, this is it, this is the sum of all that fiction can do, this is the one I will remember when I try to remember why I love fiction so much, this is what I think writing is really about, about telling a story with the power to touch someone as deeply as I have just been touched—carried me away, up to the stars, and when it returned me to Earth and set me down to discover everything was clear now, confirmed what I had been suspecting for a while but had been afraid to admit even to myself, that I was going to be a writer.

That I was going to be a writer…or die trying.

It was truly that simple and clear. In that moment, a tremendous relief. I had found myself, my calling. I could now exit college and go about my life. The path would be a winding one, full of treachery and misery and suffering and highs and lows and who knows how long I would have to walk it, but it was clear—there was a path for me in this world, and it was going to be an incredible adventure.

Of course, there are many other reasons I became a writer. I am not saying that The Hollow Man by Dan Simmons is the reason I became a writer. I hope that is clear. What I am saying is, as far as the power of any one book can go, Dan’s strange, beautiful, terrifying, mind-expanding, horror-SF-thriller-love story was the axe that broke the ice inside of me. The key that unlocked the shackles I had put upon myself, the voice that said, Go forth, young man, and do as you must, you are free now.

And now I was going to meet the author of this book. At a newsstand in Longmont, CO. When I arrived, the store was basically empty. Except there was Dan, sitting near the back, at a small table with his books. There were maybe two or three other people standing in a loose line, having their books signed. I waited, sweating. Do I dare mention to him that I want to be a writer, that I had made such a decision? I was trembling a little. It was almost like going to visit God, or at least the highest priest of some religion you had become a big believer in. I was no one, nothing, hadn’t even finished college. How dare I talk about writing with this perfectly average looking man in his tweed jacket who obviously shot lighting from his fingertips.

When it was my turn to step up to the table, Dan greeted me warmly and offered to sign the book. I handed it over. I don’t remember much. I think I said something like, That book is very special. It might be my favorite book. I remember very clearly saying, “It’s a real honor to have you sign it.”

And I remember very clearly Dan’s response. “Well, it’s an honor to sign it for you. Would you like a personal inscription or just a signature?”

This option had not occurred to me. I did want something personal from this man, but what? All I could think of was, “How about wishing me good luck?” I was too afraid to elaborate just yet.

Dan asked for my name and began writing. He seemed so at ease, so normal. I managed to cough up an explanation.

“I am writing, some. I think I want to be a writer. I’m working on some short stories.”

“That’s good. Good for you. Do you have any markets in mind yet?” Dan asked.

Markets? This is how green I was. It took me a moment to realize he meant places to sell my work. Magazines were the most common markets for new writers back then. Back then, magazines still existed and still published stories, essays, poems and other things by writers, and sometimes they even paid the writers for their work.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe some of the magazines. I have a long way to go.”

“Short stories are a good place to start,” Dan said. “That’s how I started.”

Focus on short stories, I thought, that’s how Dan started.

I don’t remember what else we discussed. Not a lot. I was too nervous to linger, and I had to get back to work. I thanked him and said I was looking forward to reading whatever he did next. He thanked me for coming. I left. Over the next few years I replayed the encounter many times, always cursing myself for not taking more advantage of the time. I mean, by the time he signed my book, it was just Dan and me there, no one else was waiting in line. I probably could have bought a soda and sat down beside him and asked him questions for an hour. I probably could have learned something about writing, about where and how to even begin. But that’s okay, it was enough for now.

In the years that followed, I was moved around the country, working a variety of jobs, living in various cities, writing when I could, mostly journaling, sometimes trying my hand at short stories, character sketches, snapshots of people, situations. I committed to writing every single day, no matter how bad it was. And it was all bad back then. All of it. I didn’t even bother submitting anything to the “markets,” I knew I wasn’t ready. I started writing screenplays with a friend, and that was great fun.

But then the internet came to be, and email. This was around 1998. And I looked up Dan’s email address one day. It seemed crazy that I could just send him a note, so first I fired off a one-line missive asking if this address was really the one for Dan Simmons, the author in Longmont, CO. This is moi, he responded, Dan Simmons, the author in Longmont, CO. Then I went about very carefully composing a proper fan letter. I told him I had been there at the signing in the newsstand a few years earlier. I told him I was in New York, writing screenplays, still following all his work, and so on.

Dan wrote me a very kind, very thoughtful letter in response. I was astonished, and I knew even in my excitement not to abuse the privilege and carry on writing to him just because his email address was a click away. But I did write to him from time to time, and eventually he remembered my name, and would ask how the writing was going. My screenplays got some attention in Hollywood, so of course I moved to Los Angeles thinking a big sale was imminent. Dan told me stories of his own work being optioned by film and TV people. He shared insights into the business and craft of writing. I never sold any scripts. I began to hate living in Los Angeles.

A few years later I was living in Wisconsin and Dan launched his forum on his author website. I and a few others began to gather there regularly. I had no concept of the etiquette of forum discourse, but I tried to always post with intelligence and consideration, not just as a fan boy. Like his mentor Harlan Ellison, Dan took writing seriously, exceptionally seriously, and like Ellison he suffered no fools. When people came to his forum and acted shitty or posted things in the manner of a semi-literate teenager, Dan had no qualms about banning them or giving delivering an online smackdown. We knew this place was a privilege.

We had our regulars, and some who passed through quickly. I made some friends there. A lot of us, including Dan, discussed more than just writing. There was a section for political discussions, and that was fine, for a while. But as has turned out to be the case for almost every digital sphere in the past 25 years, the politics made things ugly, the discussions and the people. It seems to me now that people are just not meant to discuss politics so much, anywhere, let alone in a digital space, where so much tone and context and basic common courtesy gets lost or willfully cast aside. Still, I will say that for a few years we did have some thoughtful, respectful political discussions, healthy debates. I learned some things and was often forced to confront my own beliefs. But eventually I tired of the political discussions there and stopped participating.

On the writing side of the forum, things were very different. Here Dan could still be a tough teacher, and sometimes I felt foolish. Like, why am I trying to discuss writing with someone who is far more knowledgeable and experienced and, by most accounts, a genius, inarguably a world-class talent, when I sound like an idiot every time I post something? But this was the cost of learning from a master, I felt. A few years later, when I saw Tarantino’s Kill Bill films, and Pei Mei appeared to serve as a mentor to the Bride, I grinned in recognition. Dan could punch through solid wood from one inch away, and I was still a dog lapping spoiled rice from a dirty bowl.

While I did not agree with everything Dan said about writing or other authors or publishing, I learned an immeasurable amount about those things from him. We had fun, a lot of fun. Dan would share some of his favorite passages from Shakespeare or Hemingway or Henry James, and we would break it down deep. We discussed modern authors, modern publishing, but when it came to the craft, Dan always preferred to point to the masters, the ones that had been defined as great by history, by other authors and serious critics and readers. We recommended books to one another, and I credit Dan with nudging me to read many authors I might not have read or simply had not yet gotten around to. Authors like Saul Bellow, John Fowles, Flaubert, Henry James, and James Dickey.

It was a real community and one I inhabited frequently while I was working on my first novel. I rarely discussed my novel in any detail on the forum. I knew this was not the place to seek opinions of our own work, especially not from Dan himself. But I did discuss the work in general, my habits, the ins and outs of finding an agent, and other topics related to publishing. I was writing in a fever state by then, working on my first novel every night after work, and on weekends, and Dan’s forum was a place of comfort for me and for other writers who were also trying to break into publishing. I’d never experienced this kind of community in college; probably I hadn’t been ready for it. But now I relied on it almost daily.

Eventually I finished my novel. After three years of writing and rewriting it, it was done. I spent another five months slowly and patiently querying agents, and after about 55 rejections, I landed a terrific literary agent. He sold my book to St. Martin’s Press nine days later, for enough money that I was able to quit my day job.

Dan had told us more than once that a writer should not quit his day job unless he sells something for at least two years’ worth of his current salary. I was incredibly fortunate to have sold my first novel for a little more than four times my current salary, so I felt that even Dan would approve of me leaving my job. I shared the news with Dan and the other regulars on the forum, and they were all very happy for me. I thanked everyone and told them how much this place had meant to me during those years of struggle. Dan gave me more encouragement and advice about what would come next as I entered the world of publishing.

When The Birthing House was released and my publisher began setting up local events for me, we scheduled one for Boulder Bookstore on the Pearl St. Mall. I had grown up with this store and had attended at least 15 or 20 author events there over the years. At least four of those were Dan’s events. He would always sign my books and answer my questions, and it was all pretty fucking incredible to come back there one day as the author hosting the event. Pretty surreal.

I invited Dan, as well as his daughter Jane, to my signing in Boulder. I had met Jane through the forum, and we had exchanged some funny and intelligent messages of our own. I did not expect Dan or any members of his family to actually attend my event, but when I took the stage, I saw them there, standing at the back of the main room on the second floor. There were about 60-70 people in all, a strong turnout for any author. Many were friends and family or people who knew me in some way, since I had grown up in Boulder. My barber was there, and my first and best babysitter. A couple of my former teachers. I was sweating profusely as I took the stage, desperately wanting to sound like a real author while not forgetting to be myself, and I can tell you it wasn’t easy with Dan Simmons standing back there, arms crossed, his expression serious.

What a night. We went well over the scheduled time. I told some fun stories, I think. I talked about how much it all meant, how I used to come here with $10 in my pocket and spend hours trying to find the perfect book, and how I had come here to attend events with other authors while I was still a fragile youngster who didn’t have the first clue about how much work and rejection really went into becoming a writer.

Dan asked some pointed questions, and I introduced him, and when everyone else realized we had a giant in our midst, a hush fell over the room. Dan asked me what I was working on next, what I had learned about publishing so far. He was not about to fawn over my book or anoint me as anything. He was, like the best teachers, there to remind me to stay focused on what lay ahead. After, Dan met my parents and told them that they should be very proud. Dan reminded them that getting anything across to a real publisher was, and still is, no joke.  

Then Dan came up to the table and had me sign a book for him. I don’t remember what I wrote. I am sure it was gibberish. I was in a state of manic shock by then. Then he asked if I would be in town for a few days (he knew I was still living in Wisconsin at the time) and gave me his phone number. He said to call if I had time to come to the house for a visit. Uh, what? Did I have the time?

When Tony Soprano invites you to the house, you make the time.

It was a day or two after my signing. I drove over to the Simmons house in northwest Longmont. I brought flowers because I didn’t know what else to do and my dad said Mrs. Simmons might appreciate that. Karen and Dan gave me a tour of their house, showing me some of Karen’s photographs (she is an excellent photographer) that had been framed and mounted on the walls. After half an hour or so, Dan led me downstairs to his office and we sat on some sofas beside his desk. I was in the belly of the beast now. The king’s lair. Surrounded by walls of books, his books and hundreds of others.

For the next few hours, we talked. We talked about publishing, my work, his work, my next book, his next book, books we hoped to write someday, other people’s books. We talked about movies, in particular films by Hitchcock, and Dan wove an interesting and very apt metaphor around Hitch’s The Birds and the scares some marriages go through, including my own at the time. We talked about family, travel, parents, college. Dan told me about the loss of his parents, both of them while he was still in college, and how he was able to press on and graduate despite being all but crippled by grief. He told me about the time Steve and Tabby came to visit and stayed a few days, in Dan and Karen’s former house in Old Town Longmont, which Steve didn’t care for because he could tell it was haunted. It took me a moment to realize Dan was referring to the Kings.

What else can I say about those hours? That I felt like an orphan who had been welcomed into the house of a Lord, a galactic talent I had admired from afar for a long time, then felt a little closer to over the years but never imagined sitting here like a couple of regular guys talking shop. That I felt part of something bigger than writing and publishing, the courtesy of writers who welcome another because what we share is, if nothing else, the suffering it took to get here. That I felt utterly out of my element, my depth, treading water in an ocean when I had just barely learned to swim.

All of that. It was glorious and exhausting.

All through those 4-5 hours, Dan and Karen could not have been more welcoming, kind, generous. I never quite stopped feeling like I was getting away with something, that I had no real business here, but the visit meant everything to me. Dan was too polite to ever nudge me out the door, I probably could have stayed for dinner, but I felt I had better shove off before anyone started to feel weird.

I was supposed to drive back to Wisconsin that night but only made it about halfway through Nebraska before I had to stop at a cheap motel and crash for a few hours. The entire experience—my signing, seeing all these people I had known for so much of my life, and spending that time with Dan, then driving through corn fields—had drained me dead behind the wheel. I checked into the first motel I could find, it was a real shithole, and I nodded off for about three hours, woke early, and raced home. It had been a once in a lifetime turn of events, and I knew that even then.

Eventually life and career and divorce made it harder for me to spend any time on Dan’s forum, and not long after that, Dan shut it down. I knew that it had become a time and energy suck for him. Most of us original regulars had moved on. The golden age of internet forums being a positive resource seemed to have ended basically everywhere. I sent Dan a few copies of my books over the years, and I continued to read everything he put out.

I knew Dan had some health problems over the years. He’d shared as much with us on his forum and with me personally. I didn’t know how serious these problems were, or when they became serious, but when a forthcoming novel of his was delayed a few times and I hadn’t heard anything new about him, I imagined things had gotten tough for him and his family.

So, it was not a total surprise to learn of his passing this late February. One of the awful but perhaps necessary things about social media is that you learn of these losses pretty quickly. I personally have grown tired of posting much on any social media, and I don’t spend enough time on any channels to really know what’s going on. They all have their ill effects as far as I’m concerned, and somehow you don’t see as many of the people you would like to see there but you do see a lot of people you are not sure you ever knew.

Sadly, we seem to lose important people every year now. I lost my friend and literary agent last year, Scott Miller. He was my age. He was the one agent who said yes when the others said no. He took such incredible care of me, and helped me sell many, many more books than I ever imagined or probably deserved. He also became a dear friend, and it was so devastating to lose him that I have not really been able to finish all the things I have started to write about him, which is why I haven’t shared anything about Scott beyond what I have shared with his wife. In some ways it would be easier to put Scott in my next novel and write about him that way, which is probably what I will do.

In truth, it’s getting harder and harder to write something like this, even when the person we’ve lost means so much. We’ve lost movie stars, musicians, authors, and other “big name” people over the years, many of whom meant a great deal to me. And I just haven’t been able to find the energy, the wherewithal, the emotional fortitude to write anything worthy of them. And that’s really the thing. When you lose someone important, as a writer you want to honor them in some way with your words. But the more they meant to you, the more you want to say, and say it better, and the whole enterprise begins to feel like a mountain. It’s just sad, that’s all. And sad doesn’t give me energy, at least not to write.

But I have been thinking about Dan and his family for weeks since he passed. I have been thinking of what he meant to me. Off all he taught me. Of what so many authors mean to so many readers. And especially what a real author can mean to a young person who one day hopes to become an author, too. We have literary heroes the way kids who dream of making it to the NBA have Michael Jordan. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to meet them, to have them sign a book or answer a question. We are fans, but if we are serious about writing, we are also more than fans. We come to revere the work because we understand, at least in some way, the scale of what one of these giants has really done.

I am blessed to have found my calling and to have enjoyed some publishing success. I have received support for my work from other well established authors, both in the form of blurbs on my books and in the form of personal support, a friendly email from time to time, dinner and a pint in New York. I’ve also heard from a lot of folks who don’t care for my work, some of whom were genuinely angered by it. And that’s part of the deal too.

I am not in league with Dan Simmons, never will be, and I never had any illusions about that. Most of my books are already slipping out of print. I just published another last year, and I am damn proud of it. I think Dan would have been proud of it, or proud of the pivot I took, out of the horror genre to write a comedy with some real-life drama mixed in. He always respected authors who refused to be pigeon-holed in one genre. I’m working on a new book, and I know I will always be a writer, whether I publish more books or not. I found my thing, and while I will never make a lot of money at it, it’s been the education and foundation of my life. For that I am grateful. It is enough.

I love books. I love writing. I respect authors who care deeply about the craft of writing, and I try to learn from them.

Dan epitomized that for me. He was the ultimate example of an author who delivers the pure joy of genre fiction while elevating every genre he worked in. He was a great writer and his work will be around for a long time. Through his work, and his teachings, he made me a better writer than I would have been without those things.

We are so fortunate to have his stories. I’m going to reread The Hollow Man again soon, for the 8^th or 9^th time. It’s that good of a story, and it’s one way to remember Dan, and the lost kid I used to be, and the strange but amazing path of my life from then to here.

Thank you for showing me where that path began, Dan. And for giving me a flashlight as I set out. And for all the time you spent sharing your knowledge online, trying to teach us mere mortals. I hope you know it counted. It counted very much to me. For many years, when I first began reading your work, I wished so badly I had found a writing teacher like you while I was in high school or college. Perhaps I would have stayed in school. But then, I got to have my ideal teacher anyway, and it was a priceless education that left no student loans to pay.

Maybe one day we can sit and talk about writing again, if Bremen had it right and such other worlds than these do exist.

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death’s dream kingdom

These do not appear.

Goodnight, good sir.