I wrote my first s-f story when I was thirteen or so—it was quite terrible—and went on writing them, and started to send them to the magazines I had been reading. I got them all back very swiftly, but once the editors figured out that they were dealing with a fairly talented boy rather than a demented adult, they sent me little notes of encouragement with each rejection, urging me to keep at it, study my craft, persevere in my ambition. Which I did, and when I was seventeen a magazine sent me a check instead of a rejection letter, and I was off and running as a science-fiction writer, just as I had dreamed of being since my earliest teens.

From 1955, when I was still in college, to 1959, I wrote one story after another, and sold them all, to Astounding and Amazing, to Fantastic Universe, to If, to Infinity, to all the science-fiction magazines of the day. It was a marvelous beginning to my career, and I never even thought of getting a real-world job when I graduated from college: I simply stayed home, wrote stories as fast as I could, filled whole magazines with my output. It was great while it lasted. But it didn’t last.

There was a big upheaval in the business of magazine distribution in 1958, and many of the magazines I had been writing for suddenly went out of business. I hung on as a full-time science-fiction writer as long as I could, but after a time there weren’t enough magazines left to support a prolific writer like me. I hunted around for new markets. One of my best s-f markets had been a magazine called Super Science Fiction, which began publication in 1956 under the editorship of an old-time magazine guy named W.W. Scott who cheerfully admitted that he knew nothing about science fiction, and, after I got to know him, asked me to help him out by doing a lot of stories for him. I was happy to oblige, and he bought every one, and gradually, as the s-f market started to vanish, I began writing for Trapped and Guilty, two magazines of crime fiction that he also edited. I had never been much of a reader of crime stories, unless you count the Sherlock Holmes stories, but I discovered that I had a knack for it and very quickly I was writing two and three stories an issue for Trapped and Guilty.