Trying to force myself into the more conventional method has not worked; it has simply resulted in my snapping at my wife for a couple of months and getting no other work done either. So I am going to devote the next week to an attempt to start a story suitable for Boys’ Life on spec-no outline. Probably it will work and probably they will buy it. But if I can’t click in about a week I shall have to tell them that I have nothing to offer them at this time-I shall have to cut my losses and get busy on something I can do.
September 13, 1956: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
I’ve been wanting to write to you ever since I spoke with you on Sunday, but I have been busy on a draft of a novelette for Boys’ Life. I finished it last night and will now try to clear my desk-starting with your letter.
I think I finally have a story that Boys’ Life can use, provided I can now sweat it down to an acceptable length without bleeding it to death. The title is “Tenderfoot on Venus” and is about a Scout and his dog and his chum in a Boy Scout troop on Venus-no sex, no firearms, no fighting between the boys, knives used only for things that a Scout legitimately uses knives for, no villains other than the hazards of nature. I have no real doubts about the story; while it isn’t immortal literature, it is a good, decent, adventure story. But I do want to use as much wordage as possible in the final draft because of the always present problem of building up a convincingly detailed background in a science fiction story laid in the future in a strange scene. Could you phone their editor and ask him for his absolute top word length? The more space I have, the better the story will be.
Final copy should be in New York about one month from now. They can count on that.
EMOTIONAL DISTURBANCES
August 27, 1953: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
I greatly sympathize with her [Peggy Blassingame] emotional difficulty, being subject to it myself, although from different causes. When I am working on a book, any commitment at all other than the book itself is almost unbearable. A dinner date four days away will get between me and the typewriter and make it very hard to work…very hard to keep and hold that out-of-the-world reverie that seems (for me) to be almost indispensable to empathic fiction. This neurotic peculiarity of mine is quite inconvenient to Ginny, as I am quite reluctant to take part in any social activity arranged earlier than about 5 P.M. on the day it takes place-I don’t mind socializing during a story as long as I don’t know about it ahead of time, but that limitation is very awkward for a hostess.
STORY CHANGES
March 28, 1957: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
…delay on Methuselah’s Children. Both Ginny and I have been over it carefully since I last wrote. She thinks it needs a complete rewrite from beginning to end; I am certainly convinced that it should not go on the market until I have worked on it a bit and perhaps completely rewritten it. I greet this task with the delight with which I change a tire in the rain at night, but it has to be done, I am afraid. Worst of all, it uses time I had intended to put onto new copy. With luck I should forward it to you not too late in April…
…My strongest misgiving about a release through Doubleday is on other grounds, however: I am afraid that Methuselah simply does not stand up to the quality of Puppet Masters and The Door into Summer, I am afraid it would look like a slump. It was written sixteen years ago; I have learned something of story telling techniques in that time, I think.
EXCERPTS
February 16, 1968: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
And I have another letter from — concerning that request to use an excerpt from “Logic of Empire.” This time he tells me approximately (not exactly) what he wants to excerpt but says that he cannot tell me how much I would be paid. Well, from what I know of British prices, I doubt if he contemplates paying more than ten to twenty dollars for a thousand words. But I can’t see why he expects me to sell for an unstated price. I’m tempted to tell him that short excerpts call for short-short story rates-say about a shilling a word.