Chamblee54

There is nothing like a Harlan Ellison foreword. The man has a warehouse of memories, and he can pull one or two out to add flavor to any situation. Most story collections have forewords.
There is a similar word, forehead, for the part of the face between the eyebrows and the hairline. Unless you are a werewolf, the skin is devoid of hair. PG;’s mom was a fine southern lady, who tried to use good english around her spawn. She did, however, refer to this body part as the “fard”. When PG saw forehead in print, he was puzzled.
Back to Mr. Ellison, or HJE, for Harlan Jay Ellison . (Spell check suggestions: HE, HIE, HOE, HUE) The foreword is to a book titled No Doors No Windows . The stories purport to tell crime and suspense stories. This is not the “speculative fiction” that HJE is famous for. And please, if you value your peace of mind, do not use the phrase “sci fi” around this writer.
Back in the day before PG was old enough to buy magazines, there were a number of magazines flogging crime stories. HJE was a two finger typing whore , writing whatever the market would buy. When “No Windows No Doors” was published in 1975, the glory days of crime magazines was over.
By 1983, the edition that PG owns was printed. It has a nifty computer generated cover drawing of a man breaking through a brick wall. The man is bare handed, and morphs into the wall below his navel.
PG has read other HJE collections, but has never bought one. This volume fell into his hands by accident. PG’s friend Uzi bought a chair, and recruited PG to help drag it inside. Before this happened, the old chair went into a van, so that it could go disappear. To make room for the old chair, some boxes had to be shifted around in the van. One of these boxes was a stack of books, once owned by Uzi’s late friend Lenny. PG looked over this box, and took a few books home.
NWND is the classic 4″x6″( actually 4 1/8″x6 7/8″) paperback, that fits in your back pocket. PG was working a temp job, that involved a lot of sitting and waiting. A back pocket book is an essential companion for a day like this.
The intro/foreword starts with a commentary about the insane artist. From Benito Mussolini to Hieronymus Bosch, they have channeled their nuttiness into entertainment. Next, HJE protests being stuck in the SciFi ghetto. Mind you, this was in 1975, before the advent of the speculation convention. HJE is reported to have gotten in a fistfight at Dragoncon a few years back. Maybe this commentary is another form of speculation.
1975 was before the creation of the word processor. Today, you click on a menu item and get a word count. The entry window for this blog provides the same service, whether you click or not. During the Nixon regime, it was a bit stickier. HJE set his margins just so, uses the proper font, and produced 250-300 words a page. ( The internet is just one long page, like the rolls of paper that Jack Kerouac used to type on. PG realizes that he never thinks of his blog posts in terms of pages.)
HJE guesstimates producing 260 words per typed page. The intro is 42 typed pages, 12k words, and occupies 30 pages of the book. On page 30, HJE lists some categories of story length. A short story is under 7.5k words. A novelette is 7.5k to 17.5k, and a novella is 17.5k – 40k. Only those works longer than 40k words get to be called novels.
And the mountain erodes. It would be a while longer before PG has to do anything, but he is tired of writing in this notebook. When you are used to typing in a machine, writing by hand is a drag. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress