Thursday, January 17, 2008  First Person Speculative  I was
thinking about my fiction -- writers are always thinking about
their fiction -- and I realized something that had not occurred
to me before. Please bear with me for a minute; what follows is
not ego but tentative insight. Of the four stories I have in
upcoming Bests of the Year, plus the two on the preliminary
Nebula ballot, all but one ("Safeguard") is written in first
person. And of my previous awards for short fiction, only one
("Beggars in Spain") was written in anything except first
person.  Why is this? It's not because readers in general prefer
first person narratives; a quick scan of a long list of Nebula
and Hugo winners reveals that. I think, rather, that it's
because I, with my personal idiosyncrasies, write better in
first person than in third.  In first person, I feel more free
-- not necessarily am more free, but feel more free -- to go
deeper into a character. The character's voice helps me to
become him or her, which is my general (if