Planetside Full Archives

Working in Manhattan meant I was in the center of the universe. While working for DC Comics, I was a few blocks from Pocket Books where I was contributing to their Star Trek line of novels and a few blocks…

  In my freshman year in college, I made a serious mistake. I tried to workshop a science fiction story in my first creative writing class. I was completely addicted to science fiction and fantasy, having spent my childhood and…

Daughter of two Cuban political exiles, M.C.A. Hogarth was born a foreigner in the American melting pot and has had a fascination for the gaps in cultures and the bridges that span them ever since. She has been many things–web…

  I suppose I wanted to be convinced. While at a convention last summer, I attended a panel of SFWA members there to discuss and answer questions about the organization. When the panelists mentioned it would be nice to hear…

Back in college, when I first set out to be a professional author, the biggest question I wanted answered upfront was: “What does being a pro author mean?” What were the qualifications? How did I set goals to become a…

When I first qualified for SFWA, it had been going through yet another kerfuffle—which one almost certainly doesn’t matter; they tend to come up again and again. People were quitting, and there were questions about whether SFWA is still relevant….

It happens that I’m writing this blog in an airport, on my way home from a con where I moderated a panel about what SFWA offers to members. It’s something I’ve talked about a lot over the last few years,…

When I heard that the SFWA blog editors were asking members to write about their experiences with SFWA, my first thought was that I wasn’t the right person to do such a post.  After all, I’m not a big-name author,…

I joined SFWA for the same reason I have joined other professional organizations over the course of my career—it’s important to be part of the industry at a group level to be in the know, get to meet other professionals,…

Right about now, many of you are wishing that you never had to deal with about half of SFWA ever again, but let’s step back momentarily from the fury and heartaching, and look at the discussion for what it really…

  I first heard about SFWA in my senior year of college, through the Columbia University Science Fiction Society (CUSFS). We had invited Paul Levinson, then president of SFWA, to talk to our group about his work, and in turn…

In April 1995, I was a barely wet-behind-the-ears writer of science fiction. My first story was scheduled to appear in the July/August 1995 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and so had not even appeared yet. The Nebula Banquet…

Perhaps because of my Midwestern upbringing, perhaps because of circumstances of education, one of my core values has always been volunteerism. It’s one of the things that keeps the human race muddling along and generally pointed in an upward direction,…

There was a time—less than a year ago, in fact—when I dreamed of joining the SFWA. Among writers of speculative fiction, the organization represents the gold standard, the elite story crafters whose work I’d long read and admired. For someone…

When I was a very young teen writer, I read articles on the SFWA website as a reward for meeting my writing goals. SFWA was a source I trusted and admired; they were some magical conglomerate of that elusive creature,…

A few years ago I attended Viable Paradise, which is a one-week writer’s workshop taught by some of the most talented authors currently writing SF/F. The year I went Steven Gould (our current SFWA president) critiqued my story, in fact,…

I don’t remember exactly how long ago I joined SFWA. I do know that it was shortly after my stories were published in the early issues of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, so that puts it somewhere around 1990, so this…