Newsletter – October 17, 2025
Ray Bradbury. On campus. In person!
It was my first semester at the University of Southern California where I was working on my Master’s Degree, and one of the great icons of science fiction was coming to campus to speak!
The man who wrote Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and countless short stories. THAT Ray Bradbury.
And because I was born in October, he clearly wrote The October Country just for me. I had to meet him!
What made me think of him for this newsletter? I’ve been listening to his novel Death Is A Lonely Business, another Bradbury masterpiece that he wrote in 1985. It features a young aspiring writer in 1949 living alone in Venice, California, who gets caught up in a murder mystery that’s rife with haunting metaphors of fog and mist, and a pay phone that rings in the middle of the night only to deliver the sound of a distant person breathing.
Bradbury doesn’t write horror, he writes the stuff that makes you pull your covers over your head to protect yourself from the monsters under the bed. The psychological terror of childhood fears. He’s a poet of anxiety, a purveyor of winds off the graveyard.
In this novel, his protagonist is writing some of the same stories that Bradbury himself wrote in his younger years. An informed reader will hear the echoes of stories like “The Fog Horn,” “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit,” and many more. I was transported to when I had first read these stories and felt like Bradbury was telling me the origin of each story.
In his talk at USC, he pointed through the dark auditorium, his finger penetrating the walls and across the quad. “The library,” he told us, “that’s your most important education of all right behind you.” The university had a huge library. “Go read,” he told us, “anything you can get your hands on. That’s where you’ll learn the most. One book will lead you to the next and the next… Never stop.”
I never have.
While I sat listening to him speak I thought about the many stories he had adapted into short plays, and I wrote him an invitation to see me in my first play at USC, Eugene O’Neil’s “Ah, Wilderness!” I promised to reserve two tickets for him if he could make it.
The other advice he gave about writing was entirely practical: begin by writing short stories. You can spend a year writing a terrible novel and it’ll waste a year of your time, or you can write fifty-two short stories, one a week, and sell at least one. He defied anyone to write fifty-two terrible stories in a row, one of them was going to be good!
A few years later I wrote one story and sent it in to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. I sent it on paper, through the mail, with an SASE (Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope) so they could send me their reply. I still have that story in my files, and my rejection slip. I was too embarrassed to send it out to another magazine, or to write fifty-one more. My bad.
I was also embarrassed when I handed Mr. Bradbury my hand-written invitation to see my play. Others were waiting in line for autographs but I had to run to class so I just handed him the folded paper.
“Does it have your return address?” he asked, stopping to take me in, probably seeing a reflection of himself in my eyes.
“No,” I answered, “you don’t have to answer it.”
I still picture him opening up my note and reading it long after the play was done, thinking to himself “I’d like to have seen that.”
TTFN
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Tabitha is still coming to eat her medicated food, but we’re going to run out. We need to capture her soon. Her son, GG, looks in the window to see if I’ll come out to pet him while he eats. He also lies on top of the picnic table outside to watch TV with us every night.
He’s so ready to be domesticated.
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For anyone who lives around Lafayette, Indiana, I’ll be signing copies of The Most Amazing Museum of Los Angeles at Main Street Books on Saturday, October 25th from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM.
The books make a good holiday gift for children ages 8 to 12. I’ve heard from parents and grandparents who have read the book aloud—the original audiobook—saying they created special memories with the young folk.
I can sell you a MAMLA coffee mug for your hot apple cider, and I’ll be giving away bookmarks and mazes if you just want to come by and say hi.
October 25th is the last day of the Farmer’s Market for the 2025 season. Always a fun time and just a block away from Main Street Books.
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If you received this email because it was forwarded to you by a subscriber, welcome. You can subscribe as well by following the link on my website: ericmargerum.com. A free story awaits you there.
Eric Margerum 