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Stephen’s dead.
I am speechless.
Though I knew something had to have happened: He was such a prolific and adept user of social media, and then in May, his Instagram and FB accounts went radio silence.
I emailed a couple of times. Phoned once. Wrote him a card. (Though I didn’t mail it, it’s still sitting on my desk in that little pile of thank you notes, birthday cards etc etc that I am too lazy/distracted/ambivalent to take to the post office.)
I feared the worst when he didn’t answer those emails.
Stephen and I weren’t exactly friends. I’m not sure we were ever friends.
Though we were something.
He was an incredibly charming, vastly entertaining, somewhat mysterious (by choice), and extremely kind man.
Memory eternal, Stephen M. Silverman.
###
This is the unabridged, unexpurgated True Life Story of my relationship with Stephen. A relationship that began when Stephen and I worked at People Online together—which means a significant chunk of this tale overlaps with those exciting times when the Internet was very, very new. If the Internet were a newly created star, one might call the times I am about to describe the “condensation from one massive ball of overheated gas” Internet phase.
###
But before I can tell that tale, I must establish a context. And that context began with a scholarship I won to attend a Famous Writing Workshop in 1993.
###
The Clarion Writers Workshop was life-changing for me in so, so, many ways.
It taught me how to write—which it was intended to do.
But it also introduced me to three people who had an enormous influence on my life—Ben (who became my second husband), Lucius Shepard (who became my literary mentor), and Alice K. Turner, Playboy Magazine’s longtime fiction editor.
###
I could already write, of course—kinda, sorta, somewhat. I had an excellent vocabulary. I was very good with unusual word choices, which gave me the ability to spin striking phrases. I had synesthesia, so I could move about figurative landscapes freely. And I was observant, which meant I could write about things in ways that seemed revelatory that other writers either overlooked or chose to ignore.
Every once in a while, I was even able to produce something good.
Though such times were mainly proof of the infinite monkey theorem: Give a million monkeys each a liter of vodka, an Olivetti typewriter, and a lotta time, and one of them will type Hamlet. Serendipity at work!
(In my case, maybe it wasn’t million drunken monkeys with typewriters. Maybe it was only 100,00 drunken monkeys with typewriters. But still…)
It was at Clarion that I learned the difference between self-expression and communication.
###
I can no longer remember the name of the story I sold to Alice Turner straight out of Clarion.
Though I do remember its opening lines:
Prison was where Marlow learned about computers.
You can only sleep 20 hours a day for so long.
Selling a story to Playboy was an enormous coup. Real writers with impressive literary pedigrees plotted and schemed to sell stories to Playboy: The magazine paid $5,000 a pop. I was the wunderkind!
But I was not yet a real writer—meaning I was not yet at a point in my craft where I was able to incorporate editorial suggestions.
Alice Turner wanted me to write a story about a hard-nosed con who becomes a sysop and then sets up a kind of exchange through which gorgeous women materialized on the other side of computer screens set up in the living spaces of mild-mannered engineers (whom marketing surveys had determined formed the majority of Playboy’s subscriber base back in 1993.)
I wanted to write a story about the dryads who’d inhabited all those trees that had then been turned into telephone poles carrying the wires over which the 28.8 k-baud Internet ran back in 1993. Dryads seeking bloodthirsty revenge upon all humankind!!!
I didn’t want to write the story Alice Turner wanted me to write. More importantly, though: I didn’t know how to write the story Alice Turner wanted me to write.
Alice Turner was gracious. Gave me a big fat kill fee. Continued to be kind to me. Invited me to stay with her whenever I had to come to NYC on business—which was more and more often as 1993 rolled into 1994 and then 1995, because I was so famous on that 28.8 k-baud Internet for my ❤️LUV❤️ of tabloids and celebrities that Time Inc actually recruited me to put People Magazine, its most popular and lucrative title, online.
###
Goodbye job with the California Department of Public Health, collecting statistics about the number, distribution, and unfortunate outcomes of crack babies!
Hello job with People Online, spinning five-minute phoners with Drew Barrymore into 1,000-word descriptions of our mutual affinity and the glamorous universe we got to share because we are both so fabulous! (While you, Dear Reader, are not!)
###
Sidebar: Sometimes, even after you do become a real writer, it’s impossible to incorporate editorial suggestions. Thus, when a Big Time Agent read the first two chapters of my Guatemala novel and told me it was unpublishable in its existing form because it had four (count ‘em!) POV characters, none overtly sympathetic, and that this would be too confusing for readers—BUT that if I edited the novel so that it contained only one point of view, he’d be willing to reconsider—I couldn’t do it.
The four points of view were woven into the mesh of the novel.
Editing the novel would essentially mean rewriting it—which would take another two years.
And I didn’t want to do that.
The publication of A Visit From the Goon Squad was still a good five years off.
###
In the beginning, the entire People Online staff consisted of me; Eric Levin, an amiable editor from the print magazine side of things who I always figured was counting down the days to retirement; a programmer whose name I no longer remember; Hala Makowska, an eccentric but undeniably brilliant biz dev savant; and Mary Farrell, another recruit from the paper magazine who once gave me this excellent editorial advice: “If you want readers to go on reading after they’ve skimmed your first two sentences, incorporate either the word ‘astride’ or the word ‘akimbo’ somewhere into those first two sentences.”
We all worked under Walt Isaacson, a sworn vassal of Time Inc, whose nebulous title was “President (or maybe Director) of New Media.”
Walt Isaacson’s second-in-command was the dazzlingly brilliant Maria Wilhelm. She was the person who’d actually hired me.
Maria had (for all I know, still has) the clearest ability to peer deep, deep into the future of anyone I’ve ever met. She was visionary in ways I didn’t understand at the time and am still stumbling over today when one or another of her predictions—mindbogglingly—comes true.
The Internet future Maria saw in the mid-1990s was an Internet future dominated by vast, multidimensional hubs, kind of like space stations spinning in the limitless Stygian darkness of cyberspace. Those hubs were called portals, and Maria was trying to ensure that the Time Inc portal—dubbed “Pathfinder”—became the Number 1 Portal in the Cyber-Universe.
To this end, Maria and her minions busily deflected all sponsorship opportunities and ad revenues (meager in those days) away from the magazine properties, so she could put them in service to Pathfinder. Ditto all marketing efforts.
The problem with this? Nobody in Time Inc’s then-vast readership knew what the fuck Pathfinder was. They knew what People Magazine was! And Time Magazine, and Entertainment Weekly, and Fortune, and, of course, Sports Illustrated.
But Pathfinder?
Wait! It's an SUV, right? Manufactured by Nissan. Not really top-of-the-line.
(Even across time and space, I can still hear Maria’s drawn-out sigh of frustration.)
This lack of Pathfinder familiarity meant that only a miniscule subset of that already tiny subset of people who even knew what the hell the Internet was back in those days would ever be moved to set their browsers to www.pathfinder.com
Plus, the deflection of resources away from the magazine properties meant the dilution of the well-known brands that dangled the right way could be the fish bait that would actually attract more users to Time Inc.
A conundrum, indeed.
###
My job at People Online was to furnish the various fishing poles, lobster pots, seine nets, etc, with tasty bait that would get the chum running.
To that end, I tried to get reporters and writers from the magazine to give us exclusive items (they wouldn’t); repurposed items from the magazine; cold-called every name on the D-through-Z Hollywood Celebrity Lists in hopes of scoring interviews (nobody would ever talk to us); and uploaded scores of photographs (there was a learning curve with that one: who knew there was a difference between .jpgs and .gifs?)
I did all this from my not-very-glamorous office in Monterey, California, because People Online would not pay me enough money to move to New York City.
Though they did pay for two or three monthly flights to New York City so I could sit in corporate boardrooms and listen to highly paid Time Inc executives pontificate on how the Internet was a complete waste of time that nobody was ever gonna turn a profit from—so wouldn’t it be smarter to pull the plug on it now before the revenue drain became real money???
###
I was busy, in other words!
I needed an assistant!
So, I hired Stephen Silverman—who was Alice Turner’s best friend.
To Be Continued
I am speechless.
Though I knew something had to have happened: He was such a prolific and adept user of social media, and then in May, his Instagram and FB accounts went radio silence.
I emailed a couple of times. Phoned once. Wrote him a card. (Though I didn’t mail it, it’s still sitting on my desk in that little pile of thank you notes, birthday cards etc etc that I am too lazy/distracted/ambivalent to take to the post office.)
I feared the worst when he didn’t answer those emails.
Stephen and I weren’t exactly friends. I’m not sure we were ever friends.
Though we were something.
He was an incredibly charming, vastly entertaining, somewhat mysterious (by choice), and extremely kind man.
Memory eternal, Stephen M. Silverman.
###
This is the unabridged, unexpurgated True Life Story of my relationship with Stephen. A relationship that began when Stephen and I worked at People Online together—which means a significant chunk of this tale overlaps with those exciting times when the Internet was very, very new. If the Internet were a newly created star, one might call the times I am about to describe the “condensation from one massive ball of overheated gas” Internet phase.
###
But before I can tell that tale, I must establish a context. And that context began with a scholarship I won to attend a Famous Writing Workshop in 1993.
###
The Clarion Writers Workshop was life-changing for me in so, so, many ways.
It taught me how to write—which it was intended to do.
But it also introduced me to three people who had an enormous influence on my life—Ben (who became my second husband), Lucius Shepard (who became my literary mentor), and Alice K. Turner, Playboy Magazine’s longtime fiction editor.
###
I could already write, of course—kinda, sorta, somewhat. I had an excellent vocabulary. I was very good with unusual word choices, which gave me the ability to spin striking phrases. I had synesthesia, so I could move about figurative landscapes freely. And I was observant, which meant I could write about things in ways that seemed revelatory that other writers either overlooked or chose to ignore.
Every once in a while, I was even able to produce something good.
Though such times were mainly proof of the infinite monkey theorem: Give a million monkeys each a liter of vodka, an Olivetti typewriter, and a lotta time, and one of them will type Hamlet. Serendipity at work!
(In my case, maybe it wasn’t million drunken monkeys with typewriters. Maybe it was only 100,00 drunken monkeys with typewriters. But still…)
It was at Clarion that I learned the difference between self-expression and communication.
###
I can no longer remember the name of the story I sold to Alice Turner straight out of Clarion.
Though I do remember its opening lines:
Prison was where Marlow learned about computers.
You can only sleep 20 hours a day for so long.
Selling a story to Playboy was an enormous coup. Real writers with impressive literary pedigrees plotted and schemed to sell stories to Playboy: The magazine paid $5,000 a pop. I was the wunderkind!
But I was not yet a real writer—meaning I was not yet at a point in my craft where I was able to incorporate editorial suggestions.
Alice Turner wanted me to write a story about a hard-nosed con who becomes a sysop and then sets up a kind of exchange through which gorgeous women materialized on the other side of computer screens set up in the living spaces of mild-mannered engineers (whom marketing surveys had determined formed the majority of Playboy’s subscriber base back in 1993.)
I wanted to write a story about the dryads who’d inhabited all those trees that had then been turned into telephone poles carrying the wires over which the 28.8 k-baud Internet ran back in 1993. Dryads seeking bloodthirsty revenge upon all humankind!!!
I didn’t want to write the story Alice Turner wanted me to write. More importantly, though: I didn’t know how to write the story Alice Turner wanted me to write.
Alice Turner was gracious. Gave me a big fat kill fee. Continued to be kind to me. Invited me to stay with her whenever I had to come to NYC on business—which was more and more often as 1993 rolled into 1994 and then 1995, because I was so famous on that 28.8 k-baud Internet for my ❤️LUV❤️ of tabloids and celebrities that Time Inc actually recruited me to put People Magazine, its most popular and lucrative title, online.
###
Goodbye job with the California Department of Public Health, collecting statistics about the number, distribution, and unfortunate outcomes of crack babies!
Hello job with People Online, spinning five-minute phoners with Drew Barrymore into 1,000-word descriptions of our mutual affinity and the glamorous universe we got to share because we are both so fabulous! (While you, Dear Reader, are not!)
###
Sidebar: Sometimes, even after you do become a real writer, it’s impossible to incorporate editorial suggestions. Thus, when a Big Time Agent read the first two chapters of my Guatemala novel and told me it was unpublishable in its existing form because it had four (count ‘em!) POV characters, none overtly sympathetic, and that this would be too confusing for readers—BUT that if I edited the novel so that it contained only one point of view, he’d be willing to reconsider—I couldn’t do it.
The four points of view were woven into the mesh of the novel.
Editing the novel would essentially mean rewriting it—which would take another two years.
And I didn’t want to do that.
The publication of A Visit From the Goon Squad was still a good five years off.
###
In the beginning, the entire People Online staff consisted of me; Eric Levin, an amiable editor from the print magazine side of things who I always figured was counting down the days to retirement; a programmer whose name I no longer remember; Hala Makowska, an eccentric but undeniably brilliant biz dev savant; and Mary Farrell, another recruit from the paper magazine who once gave me this excellent editorial advice: “If you want readers to go on reading after they’ve skimmed your first two sentences, incorporate either the word ‘astride’ or the word ‘akimbo’ somewhere into those first two sentences.”
We all worked under Walt Isaacson, a sworn vassal of Time Inc, whose nebulous title was “President (or maybe Director) of New Media.”
Walt Isaacson’s second-in-command was the dazzlingly brilliant Maria Wilhelm. She was the person who’d actually hired me.
Maria had (for all I know, still has) the clearest ability to peer deep, deep into the future of anyone I’ve ever met. She was visionary in ways I didn’t understand at the time and am still stumbling over today when one or another of her predictions—mindbogglingly—comes true.
The Internet future Maria saw in the mid-1990s was an Internet future dominated by vast, multidimensional hubs, kind of like space stations spinning in the limitless Stygian darkness of cyberspace. Those hubs were called portals, and Maria was trying to ensure that the Time Inc portal—dubbed “Pathfinder”—became the Number 1 Portal in the Cyber-Universe.
To this end, Maria and her minions busily deflected all sponsorship opportunities and ad revenues (meager in those days) away from the magazine properties, so she could put them in service to Pathfinder. Ditto all marketing efforts.
The problem with this? Nobody in Time Inc’s then-vast readership knew what the fuck Pathfinder was. They knew what People Magazine was! And Time Magazine, and Entertainment Weekly, and Fortune, and, of course, Sports Illustrated.
But Pathfinder?
Wait! It's an SUV, right? Manufactured by Nissan. Not really top-of-the-line.
(Even across time and space, I can still hear Maria’s drawn-out sigh of frustration.)
This lack of Pathfinder familiarity meant that only a miniscule subset of that already tiny subset of people who even knew what the hell the Internet was back in those days would ever be moved to set their browsers to www.pathfinder.com
Plus, the deflection of resources away from the magazine properties meant the dilution of the well-known brands that dangled the right way could be the fish bait that would actually attract more users to Time Inc.
A conundrum, indeed.
###
My job at People Online was to furnish the various fishing poles, lobster pots, seine nets, etc, with tasty bait that would get the chum running.
To that end, I tried to get reporters and writers from the magazine to give us exclusive items (they wouldn’t); repurposed items from the magazine; cold-called every name on the D-through-Z Hollywood Celebrity Lists in hopes of scoring interviews (nobody would ever talk to us); and uploaded scores of photographs (there was a learning curve with that one: who knew there was a difference between .jpgs and .gifs?)
I did all this from my not-very-glamorous office in Monterey, California, because People Online would not pay me enough money to move to New York City.
Though they did pay for two or three monthly flights to New York City so I could sit in corporate boardrooms and listen to highly paid Time Inc executives pontificate on how the Internet was a complete waste of time that nobody was ever gonna turn a profit from—so wouldn’t it be smarter to pull the plug on it now before the revenue drain became real money???
###
I was busy, in other words!
I needed an assistant!
So, I hired Stephen Silverman—who was Alice Turner’s best friend.
To Be Continued
