Grumbles from the Grave by Robert A Heinlein

Author:Robert A Heinlein [Heinlein, Robert A]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-05-20T22:13:28.176000+00:00

This has been a bad twelve months without very much real literary success. I wasted months on two collaborations which did not pay off. I wasted three months on Red Planet and it has not paid off. I've done three stories meant for slicks and they have not paid off. Aside from some reprint stuff and a sale to Boys' Life it has been a long string of failures.

I think I have analyzed in part what the trouble has been: I've been doing hack work, writing what some one else wanted me to write rather than what I wanted to write. In any case, the next year can't be any worse if I write what I want to write and have some fun out of it. It might even be better; acceptances might start coming in instead of rejections. So-I plan to write my stories instead of editor's stories. I don't intend to do any more juveniles unless I happen to have a juvenile story that I want to write. I am not going to promise Scribner's, nor anybody else, one book a year. I am not going to work against deadlines. I am not going to slant stories for slick -- nor for pulp-I am going to write my stories, the very best stories I can, and then let them sell (or not sell) to whatever market fits them. I can't do any worse than I have been doing; I might do better. And I think you will see a lot more copy out of me. I'm a fast producer when I'm happy at it.

January 2, 1950: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I want to get home awfully badly and I am worn out, but I need the money for house building.

Thanks for the SatRev of Lit-I am now a lit'rary man, entitled to wear a pipe, a spaniel, and baggy tweeds.

EDITOR 's NOTE: Robert did a review of The Conquest of Space by Chesley Bonestell and Willy Ley for the Saturday Review of Literature. It was titled (by the editors) "A Baedecker of the Solar System, " and ran as the lead article for the issue in which it appeared.

SALES

December 5, 1958: Robert A. Meinlein to Lurton Blassingame

I mailed the contract for "All You Zombies" to Bob Mills, unchanged. Certainly, I would have preferred Playboy's fancy rates, but it took me exactly one day to write it, so what the hell?...I hope that I have written in that story the Farthest South in time paradoxes.

...She [a romance writer] writes very well, and rather than have her run out of material, I would be glad to volunteer my services. I'm not as energetic as I was in the Coolidge administration, but I've learned a lot since then and that's what a writer needs: ideas.

FOREIGN SALES

February 19, 1959: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame

...Is it really true that my foreign sales have been "fabulous"? You see, I have no experience whatever on which to form an opinion. I know that

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