My first novel, as it turned out, was not of publishable quality, but I was already pondering the second. Its first kernel, as fading memory 45 years later indicates, was when my girlfriend, later to be my wife, teasingly pulled a hair on my bare leg. “Does it give you pleasure to give me pain?” I asked her. That trifling incident started me thinking: suppose there could really be a woman whose pleasure was a man’s pain? She would have to be telepathic to be aware of the emotion, though it would not be necessary for him. She would have to be uncommonly attractive to avoid driving him away. The relationship would have severe complications, if it were workable at all. This was a kind of forbidden love, difficult and painful by its very nature.

I moved on through mundane life, with the scattered employment history typical of hopeful writers. I worked in a warehouse, an office, a mental hospital, as a logger in the Vermont forest, and as a food server in a Florida cafeteria—and those were just between college semesters. After college it was truck driving for a magazine and paperback book distribution company, health insurance sales, and the US Army. I was born in England, so was a subject of the Queen, but my life was in America with my American girl. I was subject to the draft, and while military service was on the whole a waste of my time, it did pay my way for two years. Within it, I had a further variety of employments, as a basic trainee, survey instructor, meteorologist, tournament Ping-Pong player, and magazine editor and cartoonist.