"Tanya Huff - What Ho, Magic!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huff Tanya)

Well, the years went by. I managed to figure out that I wasn't Tanya Huff, and I wasn't going to be
Tanya Huff, so I settled into my own style of writing, rewriting and revising. I started, bit by bit, to feel
less intimidated. Maybe it was because of the times I'd watch her spend twenty minutes - in the back
room of the store - writing the same sentence over and over again until the cadence was exactly right.
Maybe it was the month she spent writing the same four pages of a novel over and over again because
she knew where the book was supposed to be going, but her instincts as a writer are far too strong - and
too good - to let her hack her way paint-by-numbers style through the plot; if she blocks, it's for a
reason. The book veered sharply to the left, and once she and her subconscious settled on a reasonable
compromise, she took the driver's seat again.

I still read everything she wrote as she finished it. Novels were bad, as they came chapter by chapter;
short stories came in a complete chunk.

When she finished "I'll Be Home For Christmas" I had yet to start a story for the same anthology. I read
hers, and almost didn't start one. "No," I told her, "there's no way I'm writing anything contemporary; it'll
only get compared to that, and I can't come close."

I was very glad that I didn't have that problem with "Shing Li-Ung", one of my favourite stories, because
I wasn't asked to write a story for that anthology. As someone with some background in being a banana
- white on the inside, yellow on the outside, in case you haven't come across the term - I found the story
to be particularly moving and well thought out, and I liked the end.

In fact, I like the way most of Tanya's stories end. Although she's at home with a very dark edge - as the
two horror stories in the anthology clearly show - for the most part, she deals in hope. In ideals. In what
it takes to meet those ideals half way. Her characters know, like she does, that life is tough, and that
people aren't perfect - but they don't use the excuse of imperfection to become self-indulgent, whiny
jerks. They deal with their lives. They live up to their promise.

But I digress. I was speaking about scum.

As Tanya and I got more comfortable with each other's writing we began to depend, to some extent, on
each other's opinion. And one day, when she'd handed me yet another excellent chapter with a mournful,
"this is way too slow, nothing happens, and no one's going to finish the book if they even get this far," I
was going through a complete throw-the-book-away-and-rewrite-from-the-ground-up revision. Misery,
as I mentioned above, loves company.

I read the chapter.

In addition, when I finished it, I looked up, met her expectant gaze, and said, "You are a crawling
maggot."

"What?"

"You are scum. You are vile."

"Is that good?"
 "I am in the middle of the rewrite from hell and you have the nerve to give me this and tell me that it's
awfulT Because, of course, it was wonderful.