What Is Tropism?

Tropism is Tim Pratt's journal. I'm Tim Pratt. If you want to know who I am in more detail, I have an out of date and badly annotated Bio to which you may refer.

But the short form of who I am is:

I work for A Certain Magazine as an editorial assistant, which means I sweep up, carry things, do layout, etc. Lately I've been doing some of the writing, and I also write book reviews for the magazine (which, if you don't know, is a trade publication for science fiction and fantasy publishing). I like my job.

That pays the bills; I also volunteer my time and effort as editor of Star*Line, the Journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. I like editing very much.

I write fiction, and my stories have appeared lots of places -- go to my Bibliography page for the details on that. I mostly write "mythic" fiction, which is my case means contemporary fantasy stories (in which fantastic things happen in a world that is more-or-less recognizably our own; this isn't all I write, but mostly). I don't like the term "urban fantasy" as a description of my work, if only because most of my fiction doesn't take place in urban settings. Authors that I consider influences on my work include Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Carroll, and Charles de Lint. (Along with a million others, but they're the major ones)

I also write poetry, and am arguably a better poet than I am a fiction writer. My bibliography page will tell you about my poetry publications in more detail, too.

I've kept my online journal since April of 2000. Tropism is not a blog; I often have entries that don't link to anything. Tropism is a writing log, a letter to faraway friends, a place to vent frustration, a soapbox, and a crow's nest (in the sense that I crow about my accomplishments, such as they are, from time to time). If you're interested in my motivation for keeping the journal, I refer you to this entry, which addresses that very issue.

If you want to know more about me... read the journal.