Before They Were Giants Read Online Free PDF Page A

and an invitation to lunch in the city. His first words to me were, “Does that bar of yours really exist? Because I’d sure like to go there.” He printed “The Guy with the Eyes” in February 1973. In 2008, Ben and I shared the Robert A. Heinlein Medal for Lifetime Excellence.
     
    Where were you in your life when you published this piece, and what kind of impact did it have?
     
    I was just then out of college with a BA in English (after only 7 years), and having belatedly realized I didn’t want to drive a cab, I was trying to figure out what I might do for a living when I grew up. The story’s publication ensured that day would never arrive. Thank God: all I had come up with was journalism, which I discovered I hated, and folk music, which I loved but which ceased to exist as an occupation at just that moment in history. And guarding a sewer.
     
    How has your writing changed over the years, both stylistically and in terms of your writing process?
     
    The only stylistic change I’ve ever noticed myself came with the introduction of the word processor. Before then, I’d written everything longhand. Then during the brutal donkey labor of the typing process, I’d been motivated to cut like mad, losing words, sentences, even whole paragraphs or entire subplots. Then Jef Raskin created the personal computer. Nowadays, I just scroll my golden words past, and can’t think of a reason in the world to cut any of them. Fortunately, if my readers noticed, they’ve apparently decided to keep their mouths shut and go along with the gag. Perhaps I ramble well. (P. G. Wodehouse has always been one of my favorite writers.)
     
    Other than that, my style changes on a daily basis, depending on who I’ve been reading.
     
    What advice do you have for aspiring authors?
     
    Go back; it’s a trap. After 35 straight years of sustained good luck and unbroken success, I’m as broke as when I started, paying off a mortgage, no savings, living from book to book, in a clearly dying industry. I’m 60 years old and I’ve bought one new car in my life. My TV has a cathode ray tube. Imagine how the less fortunate are doing. And from here on, things will be getting much, much worse: today’s “audience” honestly believes anyone at all can write interestingly, and doesn’t see why it should have to pay anyone to do so. They’ll find out. . . but not necessarily before a generation of writers starves to death, like jazz musicians and stage actors.
     
    On the other hand, I sleep when I’m tired, don’t get up until I’m done, wear whatever I like, work when I feel the impulse, and get to spend as many of my waking hours as I want with my best friend, my wife. I have one important deadline a year. There are urgent professional reasons why I need to read lots of great books and listen to lots of superb music and watch lots of great movies and smoke BC boo. I’ve become friends with people like Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Lawrence Block, Donald E. Westlake, Jef Raskin, Tom Robbins, John Varley, Paul Krassner, Stephen Gaskin, Cory Doctorow, and Amos Garrett. A few years ago, Laura Bush invited me and Jeanne to dinner with her and the old man, and brunch in the West Wing the next day. The other guests included Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Bob Woodward. I’m allowed backstage at both Janis Ian and Crosby, Stills & Nash concerts; David and I collaborated on a song for Robert Heinlein. And I have managed to stay interesting to the most beautiful woman I ever saw for over thirty-five years; our first grandchild is due in five months. Life so far has not entirely sucked.
     
    In return for all this, all I’ve had to do is stare at a blank monitor until beads of blood form on my forehead. And be willing to live on Scraped Icebox and Dishrag Soup sprinkled with fear.
     
    It’s going to get a lot harder from here on, though. Colleagues I consider my peers are going under. The traditional escape