Page Created: 09/23/10. Last Update: 09/23/10. Last Google Group Page Update: 05/31/08.
PAULINE ALAMA
Novels:
The Eye of Night
The author's website is: https://sites.google.com/site/paulinejalama.
MEETING SUMMARY:
Meeting Date: August 10, 2002.
Meeting Site: Bennett Books, Wyckoff, New Jersey.
Official Attendance: 30.
Meeting Program: Talk by Fantasy Writer.
Notes:
Pauline Alama also addressed the July 2004 meeting of the Association. She is a member fo the club's Writers of the Weird Critique Group and has been selling short stories to original anthologies on a regular basis in recent years.
Meeting Memories:
Newsletter Account:
The following account is reprinted with permission from THE STARSHIP EXPRESS Copyright 2002 Philip J De Parto:
The August 10, 2002 meeting of the Science Fiction Association of Bergen County was held at Bennett Books in Wyckoff, New Jersey. This was the third year in a row the group held its August event at this store and was the best attended, and arguably the best overall meeting of the three.
Barry Weinberger led the Final Frontier's pre meeting discussion of recent genre movies at 7:30 PM. He began by reading a quick list of relevant movies released since the beginning of the year and giving a quick commentary on selected titles. This proved an effective way to draw the rest of the group into the discussion.
The give and take moved from judgments of specific movies to more general comments like director's cuts of films available on DVD and other extras. Barry's dark horse recommended viewing was of SPACE STATION, a 3-D documentary shown at Imex theaters.
The featured speaker was author Pauline J Alama, a long time club member who has had stories appear in MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY'S FANTASY MAGAZINE and in the SWORD AND SORCERESS series. Her first novel, the fantasy quest THE EYE OF NIGHT, appeared as a paperback original in July.
Ms Alama had been a long time science fiction fan and was a member of the Columbia University Science Fiction Society while an undergraduate and a member of several clubs in New Jersey thereafter. She got a job in the real world and wrote short fiction with little success in getting published. After working for a few years in Manhattan, she decided to continue her education at the University of Rochester.
She was having an awful time in Rochester in 1991 when she wrote a short story about a group of people travelling north into an icy wasteland. She became interested in learning more about these people and their motivations. Unfortunately, it was dissertation time and the story and her muse went into a box for four years.
Next came an unsuccessful (untenured) academic career, three years of writers' block, a move back to New Jersey and a return to working for non profit agencies. She showed the northlands quest to her husband and some friends who said, "This is great. What happens next?" So she continued the tale and wound up with a short novel.
Family connections eventually got the manuscript into the hands of a literary agent who did not have a background in science fiction, but believed in this book. The manuscript was accepted by Bantam, contingent upon some changes.
The principal change was that her editor wanted the book expanded by another 50%. This was a matter of no small consternation, as it had taken Pauline close to ten years to write the novel.
Her solution was to expand the middle of the book, after analyzing how the existing incidents were organized. Once she understood the flow of the middle encounters, it was not too difficult to expand existing pieces and add new ones.
This led to a discussion of the art and the craft of writing. One interesting tangent concerned a band of highwaymen/outlaws encountered while the questing trio were fleeing from the city of Kreyn. Ms Alama read a chapter told from the viewpoint of another character. The dialogue and events are exactly what happened in the book, but writing from the point of view of the leader of the rebels helped her get into the mind and understand the character better.
The most unexpected digression dealt with the tale of BEOWULF. All knowledge of this epic had been lost until one copy of the manuscript was discovered a few hundred years ago. It became an ideological football in contests between Romantics and Classicists and was adapted as a rallying cry for English nationalists. Pauline explained that there was a real irony in the Romantic movement seizing writings in old English to expound on the glories of nature. Translations from the writings of those times typically go: "I'm on this leaky boat in the middle of this cold and damp sea. I wish I was home, warm and dry, and drinking with friends next to a fireplace. That's the life."
This whole digression came up because the author had gotten into trouble when writing her dissertation on BEOWULF. After examining the early translations of the epic, she concluded that objectivity did exist in scholarship and that the early translators of the saga hewed as closely as they could to that standard. This position is at odds with contemporary academic theory about the inevitability of translator bias and "pretty much drummed me out of academia."