We stayed home on the Fourth of July and worked — did not even get to fire our cannon-can’t get at it until the cabinetwork is finished and I can unpack the dining room. But we did go away to Palo Alto this weekend-heard some good music and saw a football game on television, wild excitement for the life we have been leading. In truth we had ourselves an awfully nice time and enjoyed getting away from here. (All but the cat, who thinks it is utterly unfair to cats to put him in a cage and take him to a kennel. But he needed the rest, too; he has been losing fights. I wish I could teach him to fight only smaller cats, or else Arabs-as the general with the eye patch says, it helps if you can arrange to fight Arabs.)
We are both in good health and in quite good spirits. It is still a long haul, but we can now see daylight at the end of the tunnel.
October 26, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
…Then your check arrived and all was sunshine. That check almost exactly pays for the driveway-quite a complex and expensive structure because of underground drains for that quicksand problem-and leaves money on hand and November and December royalties for taxes, finish work inside (ceilings and recessed light fixtures), and this and that. No sweat. Utter solvency. Joy. So we declared a holiday, went downtown and bought Ginny a new dress, got hold of friends, and had dinner out, avec mucho alcohol and joviality. Today I have a mild hangover but my morale has never been better.
October 14, 1968: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
After a delay of ca. 5,000 years I have formulated a basic natural law and named it, not for myself, but for the man who first noticed it: Cheops’ Law-No building is ever finished on schedule. The guest house has been 90% finished for the past month. It is now 91 % finished. I am working hard every day at my desk. Deus volent, I will yet get some fiction written.
CHAPTER VIII
*
FAN MAIL AND OTHER TIME WASTERS
March 13, 1947: Robert A. Heinlein to Saturday Evening Post
“Green Hills of Earth” has brought me in such a flood of mail that it has almost ruined me as a writer-I don’t have time to write. None of it appears to be from crackpots; about half of it comes from technical men. All of it shows that the United States is still made up of believers and hopers, for they echo the brave words I heard last summer, while standing in the shadow of a V-2 rocket: ” — anything we want to do if we want to do it badly enough.”
March 17, 1961: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
…The rest of my time has been taken up playing scrabble (Ginny wins about 60-40: she has a better vocabulary than I have) and the endless load of correspondence. I’ve got about a dozen letters on hand from high school and college kids, asking me to help them on term papers-in recent years teachers all over the country have been giving kids assignments which result in me (and, I’m sure, many other writers) receiving letters accompanied by long lists of questions…which they want answered last Wednesday…and each letter, properly answered, takes a couple of hours of time. Hell, one college boy even phoned me from West Virginia, wanted to read me the questions over the phone and have me answer them airmail special-otherwise he was going to flunk his English course. This was while I was working sixteen hours a day to cut that ms. for Putnam’s, so I told him to go right ahead and flunk his course because I was not going to stop work against a deadline to meet a commitment I had not assumed.
March 9, 1963: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
…I am clearing my desk of mail (pounds of fan mail and I’m tempted to burn it! — they all want quick answers, and only one in fifty encloses a stamped and addressed reply envelope) — and when I have that out of the way I will cut this new book, Grand Slam [Farnham’s Freehold} or whatever we call it, and try to be free about April Fool’s Day.