Yeah, but why are WE honoring John McCain?

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

152. No. Harlan was capable of being a truly miserable human being.

There's the time he groped Connie Willis. There's his locking up stories for Dangerous Visions 3 that he then never published and refused to release back to the authors so they could sell them elsewhere. And I don't think he paid for them ahead of time. There are his many lawsuits.

He was NOT acerbic in the tradition of Dorothy Parker.

Someone else (a man. . . hmm) had a nice story to tell about Ellison, and it was not in response to the negative one, but simply a casual mention in a different session.

A few years ago I was in the Taos Toolbox, a fabulous writing workshop taught by Walter Jon Williams and Nancy Kress. Absolutely amazing workshop and if you're interested in writing science fiction I highly recommend it. Anyway, in the last day or two one of the things Walter said was that there are three things that will make your career as a writer: be good, be fast, be easy to work with. Any two of the three, he added, will do the trick. And that's why, he further elaborated, Harlan Ellison can no longer get published.

I gather that in the earlier years of his professional life, Harlan was generally okay, although occasionally difficult. It's my distinct impression that the difficulty level rose a lot over the years. And, come to think of it, he seems to have been especially difficult to women. Make that a complete and total asshole. See again the groping of Connie Willis. She should have decked him, but she's a genuinely nice person.