I started in this racket in the early '70s, and when I was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, of which I was like the sixth president, I was the first one nobody ever heard of.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
While I was in high school, I discovered and began writing science fiction.
I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.
It wasn't until I was in my teens that I started admiring writers as inspirations for my own work, and my earliest influences there were Stephen King, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Richard Adams.
I was very young, and I remember this heated, passionate argument and trying to figure out some place called Vietnam, something called a Watergate, and some guy named Gerald Ford who my dad knew who had just become president, and how all these things fit together.
I started writing seriously about 1960, at the fairly advanced age of 30.
Last week I was just someone who had had a first novel published.
I first read science fiction in the old British Chum annual when I was about 12 years old.
I was a big fan of Ronald Reagan. He was the first president I got to vote for.
I'd never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer.
I always lamented that I wasn't a writer during the late '60s and the early '70s, with the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson and all those people.