By the time I figured it all out, the novel, now titled The Minionette, had taken seven years, and had become quite complicated in structure. In fact, I am not sure the science fantasy genre has seen a more intricately patterned novel. It has 39 parts, arranged into 3, 18, and Eighteen numbered sections, assembled into a larger double hexagonal structure. Picture the table of contents in hexagonal form, Parts I through VI. The 3 are the Prolog, Interlog (another innovation), and Epilog. The 36 others are parallel, with #1 matching One, #2 matching Two, #3 matching Three, and so on through Eighteen/#18. As it says in the Prolog, “Aton—while your body dies in prison, your emotion lives beyond; / Yet both are one: your death reflects your life.” Aton was legally dead when he entered prison, so that is his death sequence. I will spell out the parallels at the end of this discussion.

Before I got a position as a regular teacher, I was a substitute teacher, which was a hell of its own kind. I never knew as I started each day whether I would be home or in a school facing strange unruly students. Some days the call would come, and I would head out. More often it did not come, and so I worked on the novel. I completed it, now titled Chthon because the prison had become the unifying aspect, in 1965 and sent it off to a recommended hardcover publisher. It bounced at three hardcovers before I tried a paperback publisher. Five months passed without response, so finally I queried. And two weeks after I quit teaching and tried again to be a writer, in June 1966, it sold for a $1,500 advance. It turned out that novels paid better than stories, so I was able to earn a bare living as a writer, though my wife continued to work for several years.