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Europe.
Then I came back to the States and was discharged. I had that GI
Bill, so I went to the University of Washington for four years of
graduate study. I've already told you about that, so I won't dwell on
it. During my college years I worked part-time in grocery stores, a
perfect job for a student, since the hours can be adjusted to fit in with
the class schedule. Then I went to work for Boeing, building rocket
ships. (I was a buyer, not an engineer.) I helped, in a small way, to
put a man on the moon. I married a young lady whose history was
even more interesting than mine. I was a little miffed when I
discovered that her security clearance was higher than mine. I thought
'Top Secret' was the top of the line, but I was wrong. She'd also been
to places I hadn't even heard of, since she'd been in the Air Force,
while I'd been a ground-pounder. I soon discovered that she was a
world-class cook, a highly skilled fisherwoman, and after an
argument about whether or not that was really a deer lying behind that
log a hundred yards away late one snowy afternoon - she
demonstrated that she was a dead shot with a deer rifle by shooting poor
old Bambi right between the eyes.
I taught college for several years, and then one year the
administrators all got a pay raise and the teaching faculty didn't. I told them
what they could do with their job, and my wife and I moved to
Denver, where I (we) wrote High Hunt in our spare time while I
worked in a grocery store and my wife worked as a motel maid. We
sold High Hunt to Putnam, and I was now a published author. We
moved to Spokane, and I turned to grocery stores again to keep us
eating regularly.
I was convinced that I was a 'serious novelist', and I labored long
and hard over several unpublished (and unpublishable) novels that
moped around the edges of mawkish contemporary tragedy. In the
mid 1970s I was grinding out 'Hunsecker's Ascent', a story about
mountain-climbing which was a piece of tripe so bad that it even
bored me. (No, you can't see it. I burned it.) Then one morning
before I went off to my day-job, I was so bored that I started
doodling. My doodles produced a map of a place that never was
(and is probably a geological impossibility). Then, feeling the call of
duty, I put it away and went back to the tripe table.
Some years later I was in a bookstore going in the general
direction of the 'serious fiction'. I passed the science-fiction rack
and spotted
one of the volumes of 7he Lord of the Rings. I muttered, 'Is this old
turkey still floating around?' Then I picked it up and noticed that it
was in its seventy-eighth printing!!! That got my immediate attention,
and I went back home and dug out the aforementioned doodle. It
seemed to have some possibilities. Then, methodical as always, I
ticked off the above-listed necessities for a good medieval romance.
I'd taken those courses in Middle English authors in graduate school,
so I had a fair grip on the genre.
I realized that since I'd created this world, I was going to have to
populate it, and that meant that I'd have to create the assorted
iologies' as well before I could even begin to put together an outline.
The Rivan Codex was the result. I reasoned that each culture had to
have a different class-structure, a different mythology, a different
theology, different costumes, different, forms of address, different
national character, and even different coinage and slightly different
weights and measures. I might never come right out and use them in
the books, but they had to be there. 'The Belgariad Preliminaries'
took me most of 1978 and part of 1979. (I was still doing honest work
those days, so my time was limited.)