"Books - David Eddings - Rivan Codex, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

Then I came back to the States and was discharged. I had that GI
Bill, so I went to the University of Washington for four years of
graduate study. I've already told you about that, so I won't dwell on
it. During my college years I worked part-time in grocery stores, a
perfect job for a student, since the hours can be adjusted to fit in with
the class schedule. Then I went to work for Boeing, building rocket
ships. (I was a buyer, not an engineer.) I helped, in a small way, to
put a man on the moon. I married a young lady whose history was
even more interesting than mine. I was a little miffed when I
discovered that her security clearance was higher than mine. I thought
'Top Secret' was the top of the line, but I was wrong. She'd also been
to places I hadn't even heard of, since she'd been in the Air Force,
while I'd been a ground-pounder. I soon discovered that she was a
world-class cook, a highly skilled fisherwoman, and after an
argument about whether or not that was really a deer lying behind that
log a hundred yards away late one snowy afternoon - she
demonstrated that she was a dead shot with a deer rifle by shooting poor
old Bambi right between the eyes.
I taught college for several years, and then one year the
administrators all got a pay raise and the teaching faculty didn't. I told them
what they could do with their job, and my wife and I moved to
Denver, where I (we) wrote High Hunt in our spare time while I
worked in a grocery store and my wife worked as a motel maid. We
sold High Hunt to Putnam, and I was now a published author. We
moved to Spokane, and I turned to grocery stores again to keep us
eating regularly.
I was convinced that I was a 'serious novelist', and I labored long
and hard over several unpublished (and unpublishable) novels that
moped around the edges of mawkish contemporary tragedy. In the
mid 1970s I was grinding out 'Hunsecker's Ascent', a story about
mountain-climbing which was a piece of tripe so bad that it even
bored me. (No, you can't see it. I burned it.) Then one morning
before I went off to my day-job, I was so bored that I started
doodling. My doodles produced a map of a place that never was
(and is probably a geological impossibility). Then, feeling the call of
duty, I put it away and went back to the tripe table.
Some years later I was in a bookstore going in the general
direction of the 'serious fiction'. I passed the science-fiction rack
and spotted
one of the volumes of 7he Lord of the Rings. I muttered, 'Is this old
turkey still floating around?' Then I picked it up and noticed that it
was in its seventy-eighth printing!!! That got my immediate attention,
and I went back home and dug out the aforementioned doodle. It
seemed to have some possibilities. Then, methodical as always, I
ticked off the above-listed necessities for a good medieval romance.
I'd taken those courses in Middle English authors in graduate school,
so I had a fair grip on the genre.
I realized that since I'd created this world, I was going to have to
populate it, and that meant that I'd have to create the assorted
iologies' as well before I could even begin to put together an outline.