To date, I have never read any of his books, but I knew him. I first met him in an hourly billed online service called GEnie in the late 1980's. He had just returned home from a meeting about the movie they were making of his novel, The Hunt For Red October.
I was still in high school and asked him what advice he would give a young writer. His answer was, "Write the Goddamned thing." He went on to explain that worrying about editing and publishing and rewrites before you had even written a complete first draft was something that kept a lot of potential authors from ever even submitting their first novel. So, for at least 10 years after that I always had "Write the Damn Thing" stuck to my computer monitor.
Not only did we talk online, but we also spoke over the phone. He even recommended an agent for when I was ready to try to publish, but that was after I had already submitted my first novel, unsolicited, to Del Rey Publishing. It even made it off the slush pile and was read, though ultimately rejected. I never finished rewriting it and after a few relationships that were disastrous to my writing, it was permanently abandoned.
I have given up being a professional author, even though I believe that I was meant to be a storyteller in this life. Now this old mutt sates his writing bug by creating extremely kinky furry porn and eventually posting it here on IB for the enjoyment of a small handful of people, but nothing that will ever make me truly feel like a professional author.
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10 years, 7 months ago
03 Oct 2013 18:40 CEST
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