Glen Engel-Cox can remember the time when he first decided that he might look to writing as a career choice. "I was attending college at the University of Texas at Austin in 1985," he says. "Most of my friends I had met through electronic bulletin board systems. A large group of us had gotten together to visit the Enchanted Rock State Park, and on the way back, one of the guys loaned me a book. I had always been a voracious reader, so it wasn't a big deal. I returned the book a few weeks later, and he asked me how it was. I said it was good--not great, but well worth reading. Then he asked me if I wanted to meet the author." That book was The Artificial Kid by Bruce Sterling, and the friend was Bruce's younger brother. "After meeting Bruce, I realized that authors were just people, and that I could be one too."
Glen since has been involved in two highly praised small press science fiction magazines. For NOVA Express, he wrote reviews and critical articles on fantasy and science fiction and also served as Managing Editor for two issues. Glen wrote a book review column for the last issues of New Pathways, and also saw his first piece of fiction published there. "I attended a writer's workshop at Texas A&M, and one of the workshop exercises was to write a coherent short story under 1000 words. In my notebook, I had written this eyeball punch of a first line, 'He woke with original sin.' I took that line and wrote a little ditty about Jesus and purgatory that was a little bit fantasy and a little bit horror." Glen's involvement in writer's workshops has included both the long-running Turkey City Writer's Workshop in Austin, Texas and the Northern Colorado Writer's Workshop. "I'm not sure that workshops help you become a better writer, per se, but they do focus your attention on writing and submitting. For new writers, this is a must."
The workshops must have had some effect, because Glen has since published two more stories ("The More Things Change..." in Mike Resnick's Alternate Presidents anthology and "Going Mobile" in a limited-edition chapbook from World Fantasy Award-winning Roadkill Press). "Lately I've been focusing on more non-fiction than fiction, however. I recently became addicted to adventure travelogues, and have been planning to try my hand at some short articles, with the idea of doing a book-length trip in the future."
On the World Wide Web, Glen has made some of his forays into both fiction and non-fiction available. "I started with putting my 'reading diary' online, which was a natural actually. Since 1993 I had been writing down my impressions of a book or story right after I finished it, and sending it out to a list of interested people. When I finally found an Internet Service Provider that would allow me to set up a Web page, I immediately coded it into HTML and made it available [the table of contents is at http://www.owt.com/users/gcox/fi.contents.html]." Other items of note on Glen's pages include his first foray into both fiction ("Abraham's Bosom", the story originally published in New Pathways, at http://www.owt.com/users/gcox/Cox-002.html) and adventure travel ("A Costa Rica Notebook," written with Jill Engel, at http://www.owt.com/users/gcox/crnb-pro.html).
Regarding writing a book reviews for the Internet Daily News, Glen had this to say: "I'm looking forward to exploring new worlds of fiction and non-fiction for IDN readers. In some ways, the task is daunting--most everyone on the Internet is a reader, and a great feature of the Internet is that it gives everyone a chance to voice their opinion. I hope that my column can be more than that; not only an opinion about the book, but a chance to talk about the publishing industry and the people behind the books." For readers of Glen's First Impressions, he assures us that the column for the Internet Daily News is in addition to his reading diary, "although I suspect that I will find it hard to try to keep my First Impressions installments monthly." For the most part, he tells us, the books reviewed in IDN will not have been previously covered in First Impressions, so it will be worthwhile for people to check out both.
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