There wasn't much use in looking for a job.

I'd just quit the best job I'd ever had, or was likely to get.

A prospective employer would want to know why I left IBM. What did I say? "They wouldn't raise their standard to my level."

I asked Brenda to let me stay home and be the houseperson in the home.

I would cook cheap, nutritious meals from scratch, have a wholesome snack made when he kids got home from school, be there with a Band-Aid, if necessary, I could run the errands one of us had to lie to get time off to run, and I could write a book.

She agreed, provided that I write a book I could sell. Not the same old shit. Whining, knocking my betters, attacking New York, making excuses.

Oh, no. This was my chance. I wouldn't blow it.

I would write a book like Russell Baker's Growing Up or Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek/The Writing Life.

Well, I wrote a book like Rita Mae Brown's Starting From Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers' Manual/Rita Will: Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser.

Only I wasn't Rita Mae Brown.

I said that, since I wasn't ever going to win a genius grant I might as well give myself an evil genius grant, called the book Evil Genius, and published the book myself.

Then I wrote Open Book, about what happened to Evil Genius, and how what happened made me feel, and published it.

I felt like I had betrayed Brenda.

I felt guilty and ashamed.

But I also felt that I had to publish Open Book. It was the rest of the story.

If I didn't publish it I would be censoring myself.

I went to Fantasy Fest '86, in Key West, and took Owen with me, to help me man my booth.

When he saw those pictures of Hemingway in the Hemingway House, on safari, and fishing, in Key West, he realized that there was more to being a writer than worrying about money and shouting at your wife and kids. There was eating a fried grouper sandwich at the Half Shell Raw Bar, near the turtle kraals.

There was sitting under a royal poinciana tree with a bougainvillea vine growing up into the top, across the street from Captain Tony's Saloon, the site of the original Sloppy Joe's Bar, talking to readers and selling them your books.

Then, when I took Owen with me, to the Miami Book Fair International, to help me man my booth, and he saw the food vendors he had met in Key West, and he realized they went around from venue to venue earning a living at festivals, feasts, fiestas, the pennants snapping in the breeze, the smell of lamb, roasting on a spit, he was hooked on a life in show business.

There's no business like it.