Meanwhile I wrote stories that the genre market dutifully bounced, and pondered my novel. Malice was to be the name of the woman whose pleasure was pain; her name reflected that. I like words that sound like names, and have used them often: Finesse in Mute, Chlorine in Yon Ill Wind, Tourette and Sahara in Hope of Earth, Dropsy the Zombie in Zombie Lover, Garnishee in Swell Foop, Shrapnel in Mercenary, Havoc and Gale in Key to Havoc, sweet Stevia in Key to Chroma, but I’m getting ahead of myself, as not all of these novels are in print, but I think I have more than made my point. Aton was to be the man, his name that of the ancient Egyptian sun god. Thus “Aton, child of the sun,” in the Prolog, destined for damnation. I thought of a nice way to introduce Malice, derived from a song I heard once in 1956 and liked, “The Girl In the Wood.” (Decades later, obliging readers located that song for me, and I have it in two versions.) The mystery woman would fascinate the boy, and later torment him, so that she could experience her kind of love. No, this is not the normal way of it in real life, despite the suspicions of thwarted lovers. So it was falling into place. I took two weeks of leave time in 1958 and settled down to write a significant chunk of For Love of Malice. Because I was then in the Army, and its brutal experience was fresh in my mind, I started with the prison sequence, translating the military mood to fiction. Those who think that a novel has to be written in order from start to finish are mistaken; it can be written in any order, and later pieced together, as this one was.

But there was a problem: the full story tended to fragment into three major sections of quite different nature. Aton Five had a childhood, a prison term, and some post-prison experience. The first was idyllic, the second was savage, and the third was twisted emotion. How could these be unified? I decided to use a familiar device: flashbacks. That way I could start with the prison sequence and fill in the earlier adventures along the way. But what of the post-prison episodes? They could not be done as flashbacks, being after the prison sequence. From this problem came what was, for me, a nearly mind-boggling concept: flashforwards. As far as I know, this has not been solidly done elsewhere, though the twisted labyrinth of William Faulkner’s prose suggests it, and may have given me the idea.