am of a kindly nature and have always assumed that Ubris was a cockney way of spelling Hubris).
I mean, you’re glad of the money; let us not descend into total fantasy here (or at least not yet). When I began to publish short fiction in men’s magazines such as Cavalier, Dude, and Adam with some regularity, I was twenty-five and my wife was twenty-three. We had one child and another was on the way. I was working fifty or sixty hours a week in a laundry and making $1.75 an hour. Budget is not exactly the word for whatever it was we were on; it was more like a modified version of the Bataan Death March. The checks for those stories (on publication, never on acceptance) always seemed to come just in time to buy antibiotics for the baby’s ear infection or to keep the telephone in the apartment for another record-breaking month. Money is, let us face it, very handy and very heady. As Lily Cavenaugh says in The Talisman (and it was Peter Straub’s line, not mine), “You can never be too thin or too rich.” And if you don’t believe it, you were never really fat or really poor.
All the same, you don’t do it for money, or you’re a monkey. You don’t think of the bottom line, or you’re a monkey. You don’t think of it in terms of hourly wage, yearly wage, even lifetime wage, or you’re a monkey. In the end you don’t even do it for love, although it would be nice to think so. You do it because to not do it is suicide. And while that is tough, there are compensations I could never tell Wyatt about, because he is not that kind of guy.
Take “Word Processor of the Gods” as a for-instance. Not the best story I ever wrote; not one that’s ever going to win any prizes. But it’s not too bad, either. Sort of fun. I had just gotten my own word processor a month before (it’s a big Wang, and keep your smart comments to yourself, what do you say?) and I was still exploring what it could and couldn’t do. In particular I was fascinated with the INSERT and DELETE buttons, which make cross-outs and carets almost obsolete.
I caught myself a nasty little bug one day. What the hell, happens to the best of us. Everything inside me that wasn’t nailed down came out from one end or the other, most of it at roughly the speed of sound. By nightfall I felt very bad indeed—chills, fever, joints full of spun glass. Most of the muscles in my stomach were sprung, and my back ached.
I spent that night in the guest bedroom (which is only four running steps from the bathroom) and slept from nine until about two in the morning. I woke up knowing that was it for the night. I only stayed in bed because I was too sick to get up. So there I lay, and I got thinking about my word processor, and INSERT and DELETE. And I thought, “Wouldn’t it be funny if this guy wrote a sentence, and then, when he pushed DELETE, the subject of the sentence was deleted from the world?” That’s the way just about all of my stories start; “Wouldn’t it be funny if—?” And while many of them are scary, I never told one to people (as opposed to writing it down) that didn’t cause at least some laughter, no matter what I saw as the final intent of that story.
Anyway, I started imaging on DELETE to begin with, not exactly making up a story so much as seeing pictures in my head. I was watching this guy (who is always to me just the I-Guy until the story actually starts coming out in words, when you have to give him a name) delete pictures hanging on the wall, and chairs in the living room, and New York City, and the concept of war. Then I thought of having him insert things and having those things just pop into the world.
Then I thought, “So give him a wife that’s bad to the bone—he can delete her, maybe—and someone else who’s good to maybe insert.” And then I fell asleep, and the next morning I was pretty much okay again. The bug went away but the story didn’t. I wrote it, and you’ll see it didn’t turn out exactly as the foregoing might suggest, but then—they