It seems that you were writing regularly up until 1983, but for three decades after that very little new work appeared. What was the reason for the inactivity?

I dropped out, plain and simple, because I felt I was basically a failure. I’d worked very, very hard to turn out a lot of paperback originals in a concentrated amount of time, but nothing kicked in after that, what they call the “breakout book” or something of that nature. No offers from the movies; no sales in Europe except for the Howard pastiches, which were solely due to Glenn Lord’s efforts. I’d written the Orons and the trilogy in the space of a year and a half—the equivalent of nine standard-sized novels, because the trilogy is very big—and nothing came of it. I was burned out. I’d gone into writing fiction thinking that if I wrote good stuff and had an agent, I could at least make a modest living. How naïve can a guy be? There are so many other elements that go into it, many outside your control.

Anyhow, I’d gone part time on my job and wasn’t hired back full time, even though my understanding with my boss was that he’d do so. I was working in advertising at the time. So in a fit of pique, I quit—with nothing to fall back on. I found work in a small print shop, but my second wife was the one mainly paying the bills. I left the agency representing me at the time, which was just as well because they were becoming more interested in selling romance novels. I pitched some other agents, such as Richard Curtis, but they all turned me down. So it goes. I have never had the knack of writing at the commercial level; I’ve really tried, but it’s apparent that I’m one of these oddball writers who kind of goes off on his or her own and doesn’t fit the profile of a self-supporting, professional commercial writer. I felt at the time that I was suffering from a kind of nervous breakdown; since then, I’ve been diagnosed with severe depression and am being treated for it, so that’s more likely what was going on.

I made my peace with the fact that I’d basically put in 12 years of productive writing, from about 1971 to 1983, which is Fritz Leiber’s yardstick for a writer to turn out his or her peak work, so that was that. I wound up teaching English to adult ed students, wrote an English grammar textbook based on the handouts I created for the class, then doing more copywriting in an advertising department, working as typesetter, and finally wound up where I should have been all along: in the editorial department of a scholarly medical journal, first on the staff of Neurology in Cleveland, then with The American Journal of Ophthalmology in Chicago, and finally as managing editor of The Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. I loved it; I was in my element; I worked with the best people I’ve ever had the pleasure of spending time with, total professionals who were as persnickety about editing as I was. I’d still be there if the board of directors hadn’t decided to outsource the editorial department to a for-profit publisher.