It began by winning the Turner Tomorrow Award, the largest prize ever given to a single literary work. I knew I was close, and version eight was it - the first and only version to be a novel and the first and only version inhabited by a telepathic gorilla named Ishmael. What I'd done was terrific - and complete in its own way - but at last I faced the fact that the whole thing just couldn't be done in lightning strikes.Īnd so, on to versions six and seven (both called ANOTHER STORY TO BE IN). Parts Two and Three followed, and I began searching for the switch that would turn on Part Four. When, after a few thousand words I came to a clear climax, I said, "This MUST be seen," so I put Part One into print. THIS was a thunderstorm, and the lines crossed my pages like flashes of lightning. The versions that came before had been like rainy days with moments of sunshine. When I started writing version five, THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED in 1981, I was sure I'd found the book I was born to write. THE BOOK OF NAHASH, abandoned unfinished, was the fourth version. Like the first version, this didn't satisfy me, so I wrote a third with the same title. The first version, written in 1977-78, called MAN AND ALIEN, didn't turn out to be quite what I wanted, so wrote a second, called THE GENESIS TRANSCRIPT. It was a path made up of books - or rather versions of a book that, after twelve years, would turn out to be ISHMAEL. A few months later I set my feet on a path that would change my life completely. In 1977 I walked away from SVE and this very successful career when it became clear that I was not going to able to do there what I really wanted to do.which was not entirely clear. Within a few years I was the head of the Biography & Fine Arts Department of the American Peoples Encyclopedia when that was subsumed by a larger outfit and moved to New York, I stayed behind and moved into educational publishing, beginning at Science Research Associates (a division of IBM) and ending as Editorial Director of The Society for Vision Education (a division of the Singer Corporation).
Louis, Vienna, Loyola of Chicago), then embarked on a career in publishing in Chicago. I had and did the usual things - childhood, schools, universities (St.
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