AUDIENCE MEMBER:  “What she needs is a thirty-six-hour day!”

WINSTON:  “After she’s published her one hundredth book (Laughter) . . . and her house is surrounded by water and she can’t get out for a couple of months, then maybe . . . I mean, it’s like the article Jean did for ZEOR FORUM #2, ‘The Case of the One-Armed Donor.’  It starts off with the question people are always asking writers:  ‘Where do you come up with your ideas?’  It’s not a question of coming up with ideas, it’s how to develop them.  When it comes to the ideas, we’re beating them off with a stick!”

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  “And coming up with the plot!”

WINSTON:  “Right.  And that’s what fanzines are for.  It’s a testing ground.  We all have to get started somewhere.  I got into fanzines only because I wanted a place to be able to grow as a writer.  I was already writing.  The story I sold to Galaxy Magazine I wrote two years before I even started getting into fanzines.  I don’t think I’d even heard of fanzines before I wrote ‘Two of a Kind.’  I was just writing stories, and figured that there had to be some kind of medium for doing the kinds of stories that no one will publish professionally.  Nobody will publish your amateur TREK stories . . . nobody will publish your stories with comic book plots, like cheap space operas.  But I couldn’t draw, so I couldn’t do them as amateur comic books, so how would you publish them?  And then I heard about fanzines, not just Trekzines, but ones for science fiction, ones for comic book fans, and all kinds of stuff.  So I said, ‘This is a place where I can grow.’

“And a lot of us start out there, but not very many of us make it.  Nowadays, it’s not very unusual for a lot of us to have made our first professional story sales.  But it’s not really the first sale that counts . . . it’s the second one, it’s the third — it’s the third that SFWA will give you voting rights — and where you go on from there.  Now it’s not a question of who’s going to sell their second, third or fourth novel, but which one of us is going to be the first one to get the Hugo for something other than Fan of the Year.  That’s what the next race really is.  Which one of us ‘funny old Trekkies’ as they still call us — which still makes me seethe — is going to walk off with the Hugo Award for Best Novel or Best Novella or something . . .”

AUDIENCE MEMBER#4:  “And then we’ll say ‘Nyah, nyah, nih, nyah, nyah’ . . .”  (Laughter)

WINSTON:  “Right.  It is my fervent wish to stand up in front of the WorldCon at the Hugo Award Ceremony, give a very nice speech and at the very end say, ‘For those of you . . .