FRAN VAN CLEAVE'S SF PAGE

I started reading sf when I was 6 years old. I soon discovered old issues of _Astounding_, and became the only kid in my third grade class who read John W. Campbell's editorials in Analog every month. Imagine how well this went over in Catholic school. Back then, I found everyone else's apparent lack of nerdiness baffling. I must say that living in a time where nerdiness may actually be considered hip is the most SF-nal experience of my life.

I loved all the classic sf writers -- Asimov, Clarke, de Camp, van Vogt, Kuttner -- but my favorite was Robert Heinlein. His calm rationalist dreamers were the perfect refuge from my parents, whose increasingly irrational behavior culminated in the implosion of our nuclear family. Since my mother was also a writer, I did not want to be one. I simply wanted to live in a Heinlein story, where nobody was ever crazy.

Eventually I met Kent (see my Bio Page if you haven't already), who came conveniently equipped with a large sf library. The idea of writing the stuff myself began to obsess me. Or to put it another way, writing is cheaper than therapy and a lot more fun. At least after the first draft.

So I began writing. I wrote short stories, joined a writers' group, and learned from my rejections.

Finally the day came when one of the rejections (from Stan Schmidt at Analog) included an invitation to send other material.

Only a couple of submissions later, Stan said he'd like to see some specific changes to my short story, "Second Chance." It was a near-future exploration of the abortion controversy with free-market economics. I made the changes, Stan bought the story, and I was a published sf writer.

Stan also bought the next story I sent -- a novella about a clone. His letter, asking about whether I had done the necessary "world-building" calculations (I had), described "Ataxia in Ataraxia" as one of the best characterizations of a clone he'd seen (after hundreds of atrocious ones). That novella appeared in the December '98 issue of the magazine.

Since then, Analog has published my novella "The Mycojuana Incident" (Feb. 2001) and "Navajo Moon-Bird" (Dec. 2001).

I'm now a proud member of the Analog M.A.F.I.A. (Making Appearances Frequently in Analog).

To end the millennium, I broke out of the "Analog ghetto" with the short story "Brain Drain" in the third issue (Autumn 2000) of Artemis.

If you haven't read my work yet, you're invited to sample some right here:

• all of "Second Chance"
• a snippet from "Ataxia in Ataraxia"
• all of "Navajo Moon-Bird"
• "Brain Drain" has been reprinted by the ezine "Doing Freedom!," and you can read it right here