February 3, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
At the moment, [Ginny] is over at the house site swinging a paint brush...The job is still moving but very slowly; it looks from the outside much as it did in the last picture I sent you, but quite a lot has been accomplished inside. We are stalled by the glazing-still no firm date as to when our double-glazing units will arrive. It is not only a strain on us-Ginny in particular, since she has to put up with the primitive housekeeping and cooking facilities of this summer cabin-but also it has had a very bad effect on our general contractor; he's become moody and tempery, and unable to supervise other mechanics without chewing them out-which in my opinion is not the way to get the most out of a man.
February 17, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
Building-we seem to be frozen in a nightmare. The glazing units still have not arrived-the manager won't even promise a firm date. The water closets and hand basins which were supposed to be in stock in San Jose (it now appears) do not even exist and we must wait until the factory again makes a run of that color. One of the soi-disant "mechanics" who loused up our water system is now suing us for "wages" -- trial on the 24th. We have developed a great big bog of quicksand in our driveway, so it must now be rebuilt at God knows what expense. In the meantime, the wiring progresses at painful slowness...
But our house in Colorado is sold at last and at not too great a loss-not much immediate cash out of the deal after closing costs and commission, but nevertheless I am much relieved. Ginny continues to swing a paint brush daily while I am slowly getting back to the drawing board to finish the detailing of the cabinet work. We are in good health, we don't owe any bills we can't pay, and Ginny says we can stay out of the red despite all these problems. The weather is beautiful, the rainy season is almost over, and things don't look too bad.
June 27, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
Nothing else of any real importance today. Ginny is working herself silly everyday on the woodwork finishing-bleaching and sanding and varnishing the mahogany; I'm still sweating over a hot drawing board on the last of the finish details; today I'm designing Ginny's office. The cabinetwork and paneling is about 80% finished now; then we have the floors, ceilings, fireplaces, permanent lighting fixtures, front steps, driveway, and some exterior painting to do-still lots but the end is a faint gleam in the distance.
July 10, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
This should be the last letter I'll have to write on a card table; Ginny has almost finished the bleaching and varnishing in my study. And today about half the cabinetwork arrived for her office; soon we will both be properly equipped for the first time in almost two years. Hallelujah! We'll be able at last to get our files straight and get caught up on correspondence and paperwork...and I am itching to reach the point where I can start in on new fiction.
Our soil is black loam on top of sand on top of hard pan. I think we can control this driveway situation simply by treating it as a permanent watercourse, accepting that and installing a slaunchwise steel-reinforced concrete ditch alongside. But I dunno. Yesterday my brother Rex told me of a friend of his, a professional soil engineer, who has a similar driveway problem and has not been able to solve it. (But I don't think ours is that bad.)
We stayed home on the Fourth of July and worked -- did not even get to fire our cannon-can't get at it until the cabinetwork is finished and I can unpack the dining room. But we did go away to Palo Alto this weekend-heard some good music and saw a football game on television, wild excitement for the life we have been leading. In truth we had ourselves an awfully nice time and enjoyed getting away from here. (All but the cat, who thinks it is utterly unfair to cats to put him in a cage and take him to a kennel. But he needed the rest, too; he has been losing fights. I wish I could teach him to fight only smaller cats, or else Arabs-as the general with the eye patch says, it helps if you can arrange to fight Arabs.)
We are both in good health and in quite good spirits. It is still a long haul, but we can now see daylight at the end of the tunnel.
October 26, 1967: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
...Then your check arrived and all was sunshine. That check almost exactly pays for the driveway-quite a complex and expensive structure because of underground drains for that quicksand problem-and leaves money on hand and November and December royalties for taxes, finish work inside (ceilings and recessed light fixtures), and this and that. No sweat. Utter solvency. Joy. So we declared a holiday, went downtown and bought Ginny a new dress, got hold of friends, and had dinner out, avec mucho alcohol and joviality. Today I have a mild hangover but my morale has never been better.
October 14, 1968: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
After a delay of ca. 5,000 years I have formulated a basic natural law and named it, not for myself, but for the man who first noticed it: Cheops' Law-No building is ever finished on schedule. The guest house has been 90% finished for the past month. It is now 91 % finished. I am working hard every day at my desk. Deus volent, I will yet get some fiction written.
CHAPTER VIII
FAN MAIL AND OTHER TIME WASTERS
March 13, 1947: Robert A. Heinlein to Saturday Evening Post
"Green Hills of Earth" has brought me in such a flood of mail that it has almost ruined me as a writer-I don't have time to write. None of it appears to be from crackpots; about half of it comes from technical men. All of it shows that the United States is still made up of believers and hopers, for they echo the brave words I heard last summer, while standing in the shadow of a V-2 rocket: " -- anything we want to do if we want to do it badly enough."
March 17, 1961: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
...The rest of my time has been taken up playing scrabble (Ginny wins about 60-40: she has a better vocabulary than I have) and the endless load of correspondence. I've got about a dozen letters on hand from high school and college kids, asking me to help them on term papers-in recent years teachers all over the country have been giving kids assignments which result in me (and, I'm sure, many other writers) receiving letters accompanied by long lists of questions...which they want answered last Wednesday...and each letter, properly answered, takes a couple of hours of time. Hell, one college boy even phoned me from West Virginia, wanted to read me the questions over the phone and have me answer them airmail special-otherwise he was going to flunk his English course. This was while I was working sixteen hours a day to cut that ms. for Putnam's, so I told him to go right ahead and flunk his course because I was not going to stop work against a deadline to meet a commitment I had not assumed.
March 9, 1963: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
...I am clearing my desk of mail (pounds of fan mail and I'm tempted to burn it! -- they all want quick answers, and only one in fifty encloses a stamped and addressed reply envelope) -- and when I have that out of the way I will cut this new book, Grand Slam [Farnham's Freehold} or whatever we call it, and try to be free about April Fool's Day.
February 4, 1969: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
(Speaking of the time burned up by overhead work such as that-poor Ginny! Fan mail has gotten utterly out of hand, and about a month ago, in a frantic attempt to get back to writing ms., I dumped it all on her. This morning in came about the 500th letter from still another young man who had read Stranger and wanted to discuss his soul with me. He had been "meditating" and taking courses in "sensativity" (sic). So I passed it over to Ginny, my surrogate chela in the guru business. She read it, looked tired, and said wistfully, "You know, I wish I had all the time to meditate that these kids seem to have.")