Meanwhile I left the Army and moved into civilian life as a technical writer, which at times was more like a file clerk, and then as a state social worker. None of these were right for me; what I really wanted was to write. This led to one of the key decisions of my life: to get serious about it, at the risk of my livelihood. And so my wife went to work to earn our living while I took one year, from October 1962 to October 1963, to write full time. The deal was that if I did not make it, then I would give up my foolish ambition to be a writer, and focus on making a good mundane living. I had a cousin who had done the same, failed to make it, and thereafter made a good conventional living. Well, I made it, selling two stories in that year for a total of $160. That was gratifying, but not sufficient to earn my living, so I returned to school to get my teaching certificate, and became a high school English teacher.

However, in the course of that writing year I got in touch with several other seriously hopeful writers, and we formed a group to critique each other’s efforts. This was excellent feedback, and in time all of us succeeded in breaking into paying print. I showed them my novel fragment, and got good comment. Their input remains in the text of the novel; it did help. I recommend this sort of interaction to others who want serious feedback on their writing. It can be painful, and fights can break out—we had some doozies—but overall I think we all agreed the experience was good.

Yes, I can give mild examples: two members of the group were female, and when something sexy was presented, they took umbrage. One actually said to me, as memory serves, “I am objective about this, but I just want to know whether you can honestly look yourself in the mirror after writing such stuff?” The piece in question was my sexy story “Ship of Mustard,” published decades later in my collection Alien Plot. The other woman said that the Caterpillar/Jelly-Whale scene in the novel had two monsters too many. I had a character named Evadne, suggested by my wife when I said I needed an ugly female name. Later I decided to make it match the more descriptive ones used in the prison caverns, so I changed it to Garnet. Other members of the group felt that was a bad change. I found such comments unhelpful, but they were atypical; most really did help me muscle the novel into shape. More serious quarrels, for other reasons, led to some lifelong alienations, unfortunately. So be warned that such things can happen; writers may have great imagination and extremely thin hides. I also got useful comment from my wife’s family, and from a writing seminar I attended in Kentucky. Everything contributed.