Two years later Susan Allison, who'd taken Jim's place at Ace when he moved to Tor, called. War books were hot in 1980 and the publisher of Ace Books had told all his divisions to start war series. Hammer's Slammers had been a success,so Susan asked me to write a Military SF series.She offered me full control over plot, characters, and everything else, so long as it was a series and it was Military SF.
This was a very good offer. I wasn't being requested to do anything I wasn't perfectly willing to do; I'd have gotten full credit and royalties, and Ace would pay something in the order of $7,500 per book.
I thought about it, then said I'd write one novel to kick the series off. Ace could have the characters and setting for other writers to use, but I wouldn't be involved in the series after that first book. (It eventually came out from Tor as The Forlorn Hope.)
When I turned Jim down,I was a full-time attorney with a reasonable salary.In 1980, I was a bus driver earning $4.05 an hour during the 20-30 hours a week I worked.(My year of driving a bus earned me a total of $6,100,including a couple months of summer layoff when unemployment—based on my previous job as an attorney—paid me more than I would've made if working.) I preferred to drive a bus rather than to write commissioned books which would take me no more than six months apiece.
Looked at from the outside, that would appear to be an insane decision. In a manner of speaking, it was insane: I was finally getting my head up from Viet Nam. I did many things for other people; writing was the only thing I did for myself. I was separating the two with an irrational rigor. I didn't want to be tied to a series then, even a series of my own creation. I would write what I felt like writing at the time, and only that.
Since 1980 I've found that the time I spend writing solo novels consistently earns me more money than the time I spend doing anything else. During those years I've created shared universes and written stories for shared universes owned by both myself and my friends. I wrote a novel in a game-based universe, and I've written over a dozen plot outlines for other writers to turn into novels on which we share credit.
I did all those things because they seemed like good ideas at the time. Sometimes they still seemed like good ideas afterward, and sometimes I've shaken my head and wondered and how I managed to get into something so stupid. That's life, after all.
Which is the point. Even in 1978 writing wasn't just a job to me: it was my life. And it still is.
THE END