AFTERWORD

Janis Ian is just swell.

She’s out on tour nine months a year (and has been since long before she could vote or drink beer) singing her head off; she came through early success and too much adulation way too early virtually unscathed; she was not, as she knew, “The New Dylan” (the old man is still around). she bootlegs her own concerts, she’s written some songs that will still be sung next century AND she’s done a duet with Dolly Parton.

Who knew that beneath that innocent face and soul-on-her-sleeve air beat the tortured yearning heart of an SF fan?

I believe she outed her inner fan-girl guilt for the 1st time at the World SF Convention in 2001 (I wasn’t there but I saw the pictures in Locus.)

I was there in 2003 in Toronto when she and her long-time partner Patricia Snyder were married (and I realized I was standing in the most enlightened country in the Western Hemisphere) in a ceremony that got a half-page spread in the New York Times. In fact, I walked into the hotel about thirty minutes after the wedding, when they were eating the wedding dinner, surrounded by the gliterati of the SF world.

To make a long story shorter: she reveals to all in 2001 that she has loved SF all her life; by 2002 she and Mike Resnick are editing Stars: An Anthology Based on the Songs of Janis Ian, which everyone wanted to be in.

Including moi.

I would have tried even if I weren’t invited, by one of the nicest letters I have ever gotten.

To people she and Mike wanted in the book, she sent, like, the 1st dozen of her CDs, for people to hear some songs they might not have been familiar with, to see if any struck sparks. I’d been listening to her stuff for 35 years by then, but I hadn’t heard everything.

Well, the second I heard “Calling Your Name” I knew that was the one for me.

I wrote it July 10-12, 2002, which means I was still living in Oso, WA, getting ready to move back to TX that September.

I got of course a nice acceptance letter back in which she said that “Calling Your Name” was what she thought of as her first “grown-up” song. (She was probably sixteen when she wrote it, the little dickens.)

Well by and by the book goes into production; by and by we get proofs which I send off expeditiously, by and by the great-looking doorstop of an anthology comes out and:

The page-proof corrections I’d made hadn’t been done—the story was so goobered up parts of it didn’t make sense. I let out a scream and fired off letters.

I got abject apologies from Janis, from Mike, and from Marty Greenberg (who’d done—silently—what we in the writing biz call “the donkey work”—getting permissions, making things happen, keeping everybody happy and on schedule etc.). In fact, from everyone but the publisher, who pretended nothing was wrong. Everybody else’s stories were just fine, and all their corrections had been made.

The fact that the story as printed didn’t make much sense didn’t keep people from recommending it for a Nebula etc., etc.

After the story came out, it was picked up by two Bests of the Year (the editors could see through the fog of wrong words that a story was there, and they got the correct text to set copy from, so what appeared in their books was what should have been there in the initial printing.)

Anyway none of this was Janis or Mike or Marty’s fault.

Later—much later—someone brought to my attention that I might have been unduly influenced by The Simpsons’ episode where Homer tried to fix the toaster and ends up time-travelling and into alternate worlds (a brilliant episode—50 SF tropes in 7 1/2 minutes.)

Well, no: I hadn’t thought about that at all. What I was trying to write was an alternate-world story in which the alternity was personal; most aren’t; they’re cultural, political or military.

How does a sixteen year old girl’s song about longing and blame become an old guy’s cry of existential pain? It’s just part of the wonder of this thing called SF, folks. Thanks, Ms. Ian.