"James Alan Gardner - Gravity Wells" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

"A Changeable Market in Slaves": Sometimes it takes a number of rewrites before I find a
good tone of voice for a story. And sometimes the rewrites get out of hand...



"Reaper": In 1989, I attended the Clarion West Science Fiction workshop. Each student was
required to write a story a week. This was my first story of the workshop, written longhand in the
depths of Seattle.

I'd had the idea of Reapers for some time before, but had never made a serious attempt to write
a story about them. At first I thought the central character was going to be a brash teenager like the
Hooch character; but after a page or two, I realized it wasn't working. That's when I switched to the
current despicable narrator... and the story practically wrote itself.



"Lesser Figures of the Greater Trumps": This is what one calls a prose poem... or at least
what I call a prose poem, for lack of a better name. At the time I wrote it, I could be pretty confident
most readers would be familiar with the Rider-Waite tarot deck. I don't know if that's true anymore.
The world seems to have acquired a disdain for such things; and not for healthy reasons like sincere
rationalism, but simply because disdain comes so easily. Pity.



"Shadow Album": In the 1980s, I did a lot of theater: writing, acting, directing, and improvising
(which is writing, acting, and directing combined). Somehow in the middle of that, I got involved in a
mask workshopтАФpossibly because said workshop was taught by my wife, Linda Carson.

Masks are powerful things, which is why they feature prominently in shamanistic religious
traditions. Donning a mask is often the first step to donning an alternate personality. Masks are
therefore used in some types of theater training to help students learn to set aside their mundane selves
and become something Other.

If this sounds hokey when you read it on the page, let me assure you it's very effective in
practice. Masks can have a powerful psychological effect... if you let them. In some sense, you can
"become" the mask: someone you'd never let yourself be otherwise. There are obvious risks in this
process, which is why mask workshops should always be led by people who know what they're
doing; but taking risks is one of the great exhilarations of acting, and when it works, you can be
transformed.

In this particular workshop, we constructed our own masks. The mask I built, and the
personality I discovered within that mask, are exactly like the character ToPu (pronounced "toa-poo")
as described in "Shadow Album." The mask of poor sad ToPu still sits in my study as I type these
wordsтАФthe closest thing to a magical object I've ever made.



"Hardware Scenario G-49": Another Clarion West story. ("Shadow Album" was, too.) All I