I'm not afraid of werewolves or vampires or haunted hotels, I'm afraid of what real human beings to do other real human beings.
It's a tough job to tell a story when the audience already knows the ending, and the ending is bleak.
For every SF reader of that period, Robert A. Heinlein was also a touchstone.
I've learned that I get blocked when my subconscious mind is telling me that I've taken the work in a wrong direction, and that once I start listening to what my subconscious is trying to tell me, I can work out the problem and get moving again.
The Rift, which was well over a thousand pages of manuscript, took two years.
The mass-market paperback, for one, is too expensive.
