I’m the first person, first male in the history of my family to go beyond high school, and what they wanted me to do was to become a teacher or become a business person or — I don’t know — but not a writer, because no one knew anything about writers or writing. So I was not encouraged by my mother or my stepfather to be a writer, but that’s all I wanted to do from the time I discovered the library and started reading all those books. So about a year after I’d been there in California, I tried to write a novel. Of course, it was a failure. I sent it to New York, and they sent it back, and then I burned it.