The second book is a memoirs-autobiography job to be published posthumously-and left uncopyrighted till then (hence of zero cash value in probate) — as a little bonus to Ginny for all the years she has put up with my cantankerous ways. If published about a year after my death it should bring her some return…if I am still writing and my works are still known at the time of my death. If I get it in fair shape, you may possibly see a draft of it later-depends on events. I have been gathering notes for such a book for many years and have recently started shaping them up…especially since 1969, which caused me to realize that I didn’t have forever if it were to be a vendable property. Working title: Grumbles from the Grave by Robert A. Heinlein (deceased). (It’s amazing how frank and how acidly funny one can be when one is certain it will never see print until the writer is safely out of reach. I’ll name names-then Ginny will have to edit it with the advice of a good lawyer to insure that she is safe, too-then no doubt the publisher’s lawyers will want some names deleted or changed, too. But I am going to write it as if with a Ouija board. It will be easy to write-lots of notes, lots of pack-rat-saved souvenirs, more than fifty years of letters, many things I have never discussed-e.g., the frontline seat I had in the crisis many years back with Japan, before World War II-a crisis involving a war ultimatum that never got into the news…plus a Secret Life of (Walter Mitty) Heinlein, etc. I’m working on it.
But the third book will be written and finished for publication as soon as I am free of taking care of Ginny through this long, long siege of oral surgery. I have it in shape to start writing this very minute but will have many, many more card notes by that time-shortly after the first of the yegr. Working title: Writing for a Living (and Haw to Live Through It) — Being the Ungarnished Facts about the Writing Racket for People Too Lazy to Dig Ditches. The first part — Writing for a Living-is for the cover and the half-title page, the entire title being for the full-title page-although the book jacket might read Writing for a Living in large letters, plus The Ungarnished Facts in much smaller letters, plus my name in quite large letters — same size as the short title, or even larger, if publisher’s judgment in dust jackets of my last several books is a guide. Besides that, for use on the inner flap and on the back of the dust jacket, and as title of the preface Ginny has suggested and is preparing a Latin fake quotation: “De Natura Scribendi etc.,” a free translation being “Concerning the Nature of the Writing Business and How Not to Get Screwed in It.” Ginny’s command of Latin grammar is good and she knows many Latin bawdy idioms…but she will write it, then enlist the help of a professor of Latin here at the campus to insure perfect grammar and exact idiom-and a choice of words as nearly self-translating as possible by selection of proper cognates of English. I’m [I’ll] probably attribute it to Juvenal or Ovid, as interpreted by Lazarus Long.
(It could have a How to Write for Money title-but I think that “How to — ” has been overworked of late years.)
A somewhat-laundered translation could be used in the dust jacket blurb (and possibly an exact translation supplied to reviewers), but the Latin itself must be idiomatically perfect. In truth it will be a most practical guide for inexperienced aspirants who are wild to do the — comparatively mild-and rather fun work that writing entails. I am going to make it extremely practical-more practical than Jack Woodford’s How to Write and Sell (his only good book, his only bestseller, and the basis for 90% + of his reputation) — but I intend to make it lively, hard to put down as a good novel by any of the millions of aspirant-writers-who-never-will-actually-write, plus the thousands who do write and could make a living at it if they knew certain rules of the game-rules that are not taught in so-called creative writing classes, nor in any book on how to write that I have ever seen.