Valley Writers Plot New Year’s Eve ’99

Some people didn’t wait for this New Year’s Eve to start planning next year’s--the Big 2000.

According to Northridge travel agent Kathy Watson, some 30 clients have already called about booking trips to celebrate the coming of the new millennium.

Cruises are especially hot, Watson says. Tour operators are promoting trips to the South Pacific, which will experience the new year first, and indeed many of her clients have asked about cruises to Hawaii.

She suspects Las Vegas and New York will also be popular destinations, although she warns that “they’re telling people in Las Vegas that they can expect 750,000 coming in for the millennium. Where they’re going to put them all, I don’t know.”

Wherever they go, people can expect to pay inflated prices for the privilege. Most tour companies can’t give exact quotes yet, but prices will probably double over current ones, Watson predicts.

If a few stalwarts have already booked hotel rooms in Fiji, many Valleyites plan to do what they do every year--stay home and crack a bottle of champagne or go to a friend’s party.

Writer Harlan Ellison isn’t planning anything special for the millennium. The Studio City resident is still lamenting the year that just passed.

“1998 has been one of the worst years for virtually every writer I know,” he says.

Ellison attributes the writer’s current plight to the dumbing down of America, in large part because of television; the sorry, and increasingly consolidated, state of publishing; the rise of the bookstore superpowers, and the Internet explosion.

Ellison is a writer whose ancient but lovingly maintained typewriter will have to be pulled from his cold, dead hand. And he is brutal on the subject of the cultural impact of cyberspace and the techies who love it: “The Internet has turned every idiot with a PC into an opinion maker,” he snaps.

The recent closing of 79 Crown bookstores, out of the chain’s 171 stores, resulted in hundreds of thousands of books being returned to their publishers, and ate into writers’ profits, including his own.

“Since I made my bones, I’ve never made less than $200,000 a year. I’m down to about 120 grand,” he says, acknowledging that he can live quite comfortably on that.

“It’s going to be worse going into the millennium,” he says. His plan: “Try to survive as an artist and as a thinking human being.”

“It’s perilous even to think that far ahead,” Ellison says of the year 2000. “We are going to dumb ourselves into extinction.”

Asked if he has already made plans for the millennium, Len Wein of Woodland Hills answers, “I haven’t even made plans for lunch.”

Another of the Valley’s sizable community of writers, Wein wrote comic books for many years, including “The New X-Men” and “Swamp Thing.” He is currently story-editing the computer-animated TV series “War Planets.”

Columnists interview writers because they are almost always good copy, and Wein is no exception.

He has a theory about the millennium--what he calls “the International Millennium Conspiracy we’ve heard so much about.” As he points out, most people know that the new millennium will actually begin Jan. 1, 2001, not Jan. 1, 2000.

He predicts 1999 will be a year in which the coming millennium will be milked for all it’s worth, “then on the second of January, they’ll say, ‘Oops,’ and keep it going for another year.”

As a writer, Wein jokes, “I can’t plan for the millennium. I have a deadline. What are other people planning--big parties, end-of-the-world bunkers?”

If Wein’s basic millennial plan “is to get through it,” his wife, Christine Valada, also has a plan--of sorts. (An attorney, she is the outside general counsel for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.)

“I’ll tell you what my plan is not,” Valada says. “My plan is not to be on an airplane. I’m going to stay on the ground.”

Writer Harry Turtledove, who lives in Canoga Park, says that his big concern for the year 2000 is his role as toastmaster at the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago. He is expected to make a brief but amusing speech and, he says, “I have all the social graces of a warmed-over tortilla.”

He agrees with Wein that the year 2000 celebration will probably spill over into the year 2001.

In Turtledove’s forecast: “They’re going to turn out so much schlock that says ‘Welcome to the Third Millennium,’ they’re going to need more than another year to sell it.”