You didn’t start out writing fantasy, you started out writing historical fiction under yet another name…
Yes, Regan O’Neal is my name for Historical Fiction. The first thing I ever wrote was Fantasy, at least I thought it was. It will never be published now because I’m a better writer now. I wrote this thing and I sent it to DAW books because I heard that DAW published first novels. So I sent it to DAW and got back a letter from Donald Wolheim that was exceedingly laudatory, and obviously he had written it at home and typed it himself because he had scratched out words and made changes in pen and his signature was cramped…and he made me an offer.
And I asked for some changes in the contract. Nothing very big. I asked for some changes in subsidiary rights that I never expected to be exercised because I wanted to establish that I wasn’t going to accept just anything that was offered. But I didn’t know enough about the industry to know if I was being offered a minuscule advance or a fairly good advance.
You wanted to establish a dialogue.
Yes. And I found out that he didn’t like beginning writers to ask for changes. He thought that beginning writers should accept what was offered. So the result of my asking for the changes was that I got a letter back saying, “Dear Sir, in view of your contract demands we are withdrawing our offer. Sincerely, Donald A. Wolheim.”
I looked at the two letters and I didn’t know why I’d gotten the second, as I hadn’t demanded anything. It was actually a very diffident letter, and I had ended by saying, “If any of these requests seem out of line, please let me know.” Thus throwing away everything, but I knew that I had no real knowledge of publishing.
So, I decided to ignore the second letter because the first letter said; you can write.
That novel that I thought of as a Fantasy was later bought by Jim Baen while he was at Ace as a Science Fiction novel. You may know that Jim doesn’t think very highly of fantasy, so he bought it as SF while DAW had bought it as Fantasy. Then Susan Allison came in to replace him when he went to TOR and she didn’t like it, so I got the rights back and it’s sat on the shelf all this time.
And what was this novel that we will never see?
Its title was Warriors of the Altaii , and you will never see it, or know anything about it. I have not destroyed the manuscript, because it has powerful juju…but in my will I have provisions to have that manuscript burned. But until then I’m afraid to get rid of the juju that resides in it.
In a way that novel led to me meeting my wife, and it led to me getting my first novel published. Because she knew about that manuscript, when Tom Doherty got the rights to do the Conan novels, he needed the first one very fast so that it would come out the same time the movie came out. And he knew that I had once written a 98,000 word novel in 13 days.
So he thought I could write something fast, and he was right, and I liked it. It was fun writing something completely over the top, full of purple prose, and in a weak moment I agreed to do five more and the novelization of the second Conan movie.
I’ve decided that those things were very good discipline for me. I had to work with a character and a world that had already been created and yet find a way to say something new about the character and the world. That was a very good exercise.
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