Frederik Pohl

Deeply saddened by the passing of 
Frederik Pohl, who proved you can be
a cynic and starry-eyed optimist at once.  

Most people don't even know how much their lives were affected by Richard Matheson. He not only wrote some of the best science fiction, horror and fantasy in film and television (The Incredible Shrinking Man, Hell House, What Dreams May Come and the book on which Somewhere In Time was based), but he invented the modern zombie genre with I Am Legend. Matheson was a national treasure. 

Sending out query letters to prospective literary agents as we speak. Every journey begins with a single step. This is my 50th or so step, after developing the concept for a novel, writing it, editing it, re-editing it, composing six separate query pitches and two separate synopses, etc. -- so I suppose I'm getting somewhere. 

Just finished my novel. Four hundred and seventeen pages, seven months of my life. Still have to edit it, and, you know, find an agent and get it published and all that. But I've written a novel, and this is one of the happiest days of my life!