find.
Meanwhile, my college years were winding down. I breezed through the first two quarters of my graduate year in Evanston, then packed my bags for Washington and my internship on Capitol Hill. In a few months my real life would begin. I had been doing interviews and sending out job applications, and was looking forward to sorting through all the offers and deciding which of them I’d take. After all, I had graduated
magna cum laude
from the finest journalism school in the country, and would soon have a Master’s degree and a prestigious internership under my belt as well. I had lost a lot of weight my graduate year and bought new clothes to suit, so I arrived in D.C. the very picture of a hippie journalist, with my shoulder-length hair, bell bottoms, aviator glasses, and double-breasted pin-striped mustard-yellow sports jacket.
My internship was demanding, but exciting. The nation was in turmoil in the spring of 1971, and I was at the center of it all, walking the corridors of power, reporting on congressmen and senators, sitting in the Senate press gallery with real reporters. The Medill News Service had client newspapers all over the country, so a number of my stories actually saw print. The program was run by Neil McNeil, a hardnosed political reporter of the green-eyeshade school who would sit in his cubicle reading your copy, and roar your name whenever he came on something he didn’t like. My own name was roared frequently. “Too cute,” McNeil would scrawl atop my stories, and I’d have to rewrite them and take out everything but the facts before he’d pass them on. I hated it, but I learned a lot.
It was also in Washington that I attended my first actual
science fiction
convention, almost seven years after that first comicon. When I walked into the Sheraton Park Hotel in my burgundy bell bottoms and double-breasted pin-striped mustard-yellow sports jacket, the fellow behind the registration table was this bone-thin hippie writer, with a scraggy beard and long orange hair. He recognized my name [no one forgets the R.R.] and told me that he was
Galaxy
’s slush reader, the very fellow who’d fished “The Hero” out of the slush pile and pushed it on Ejler Jakobsson. So I suppose Gardner Dozois made me a pro and a fan both (though I have since wondered whether he was actually working on registration, or whether he just saw the table unattended and realized that if he sat there people would hand him money. Reading slush for
Galaxy
didn’t pay much, after all).
By that time I had a second sale under my belt. Just a few weeks before, Ted White, the new editor at
Amazing
and
Fantastic,
had informed me that he was buying “The Exit to San Breta,” a futuristic fantasy that I’d written during the spring break of my senior year of college. (Yes, sad to say, when all my friends were down in Florida drinking beer with bikini-clad coeds on the beaches of Ft. Lauderdale, I was back in Bayonne, writing.) The story of my second sale was eerily similar to that of my first. Relying on the listings in
Writer’s Market,
I’d sent the story off to Harry Harrison at the address given for
Fantastic,
never to see it again. Only later did I learn that both the editor and address had changed, requiring me to retype the manuscript all over again and, well…I was starting to wonder if having your story lost in the mail was somehow a necessary prerequisite to selling it.
Galaxy
had paid me my $94 on acceptance for “The Hero,” but Fantastic paid on publication, so I would not actually see the money for “The Exit to San Breta” until October. And when the check did come, it was only for $50. A sale is a sale, however, and your second time is almost as exciting as your first, in writing as in sex. One sale might be a fluke, but
two
sales to two different editors suggested that maybe I had some talent after all.
“The Exit to San Breta” was set in the Southwest, where I live at present, but at the time I wrote it
Meanwhile, my college years were winding down. I breezed through the first two quarters of my graduate year in Evanston, then packed my bags for Washington and my internship on Capitol Hill. In a few months my real life would begin. I had been doing interviews and sending out job applications, and was looking forward to sorting through all the offers and deciding which of them I’d take. After all, I had graduated
magna cum laude
from the finest journalism school in the country, and would soon have a Master’s degree and a prestigious internership under my belt as well. I had lost a lot of weight my graduate year and bought new clothes to suit, so I arrived in D.C. the very picture of a hippie journalist, with my shoulder-length hair, bell bottoms, aviator glasses, and double-breasted pin-striped mustard-yellow sports jacket.
My internship was demanding, but exciting. The nation was in turmoil in the spring of 1971, and I was at the center of it all, walking the corridors of power, reporting on congressmen and senators, sitting in the Senate press gallery with real reporters. The Medill News Service had client newspapers all over the country, so a number of my stories actually saw print. The program was run by Neil McNeil, a hardnosed political reporter of the green-eyeshade school who would sit in his cubicle reading your copy, and roar your name whenever he came on something he didn’t like. My own name was roared frequently. “Too cute,” McNeil would scrawl atop my stories, and I’d have to rewrite them and take out everything but the facts before he’d pass them on. I hated it, but I learned a lot.
It was also in Washington that I attended my first actual
science fiction
convention, almost seven years after that first comicon. When I walked into the Sheraton Park Hotel in my burgundy bell bottoms and double-breasted pin-striped mustard-yellow sports jacket, the fellow behind the registration table was this bone-thin hippie writer, with a scraggy beard and long orange hair. He recognized my name [no one forgets the R.R.] and told me that he was
Galaxy
’s slush reader, the very fellow who’d fished “The Hero” out of the slush pile and pushed it on Ejler Jakobsson. So I suppose Gardner Dozois made me a pro and a fan both (though I have since wondered whether he was actually working on registration, or whether he just saw the table unattended and realized that if he sat there people would hand him money. Reading slush for
Galaxy
didn’t pay much, after all).
By that time I had a second sale under my belt. Just a few weeks before, Ted White, the new editor at
Amazing
and
Fantastic,
had informed me that he was buying “The Exit to San Breta,” a futuristic fantasy that I’d written during the spring break of my senior year of college. (Yes, sad to say, when all my friends were down in Florida drinking beer with bikini-clad coeds on the beaches of Ft. Lauderdale, I was back in Bayonne, writing.) The story of my second sale was eerily similar to that of my first. Relying on the listings in
Writer’s Market,
I’d sent the story off to Harry Harrison at the address given for
Fantastic,
never to see it again. Only later did I learn that both the editor and address had changed, requiring me to retype the manuscript all over again and, well…I was starting to wonder if having your story lost in the mail was somehow a necessary prerequisite to selling it.
Galaxy
had paid me my $94 on acceptance for “The Hero,” but Fantastic paid on publication, so I would not actually see the money for “The Exit to San Breta” until October. And when the check did come, it was only for $50. A sale is a sale, however, and your second time is almost as exciting as your first, in writing as in sex. One sale might be a fluke, but
two
sales to two different editors suggested that maybe I had some talent after all.
“The Exit to San Breta” was set in the Southwest, where I live at present, but at the time I wrote it
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