Point and Shoot, Florida (YU)--"Eek--no paparazzi!"

Heap was his own paparazzo.

Where do you think the name Razz came from?

Well, he wasn't his own paparazzo yet.

Before he started writing he wanted to do three things. (1) Complete his education. (2) Find a soul mate and get married. (3) Get an entry-level, white-collar job he could support himself at while he learned to write, and until he became self-supporting as a writer.

He had done two of the three. And, as a graduate student, he was working on three.

College professor would be his day job.

He and Brenda would get their PhDs, get teaching jobs at some hick school like East Jesus State University (or East Jesus Junior College), and form an archeology program where they took students into the field every summer, like the PI did at Florida State.

Well, like Chief did at Florida State.

This would be a joint venture, but mainly Brenda's baby. Heap would spend the occasional summer writing a book, and, one day, spend every summer, and the occasional sabbatical year, writing books.

Heap didn't know that, once he got started, he would spend every waking moment writing books, including Christmas Eve Day and Christmas Day. That you didn't get a holiday from writing books. And very few sick days. Although the pace might slow on holidays, owing to conflicting obligations, visitors from out of town, food, drink, exchange of gifts, driving. He didn't know that the credo of the Razz Heap School of Fiction Writing was, or would become, gradually, "Will write for food, will write for free, will pay to write."

Heap would end up writing about that inevitable transition, the realization that he wasn't going to get paid to do it, he was going to have to arrange his life so he could pay to do it. Also, it should have been obvious, but wasn't, then, to Heap, that you couldn't go at graduate school as a day job, a job you could slough off when you had other priorities, a job you could take for granted, or do just enough to get by at, could give GEFWIF to, pronounced geff-wiff. Good enough for who it's for.

It had to be the be-all and end-all of your existence, your raison d'être, not a job but a calling, and life wasn't big enough for two callings, one squoze the other out.

Heap wouldn't make it as an academic because he didn't want it bad enough, he had other fish to fry, there was some shit he would not eat.

If you go into graduate school thinking There is some shit I will not eat you won't make it out the other side, because graduate school is a test, a test of your willingness to do whatever you have to do to get and keep the job, including stab your buddy in the back.

Heap wouldn't go so far as to say that everyone who made it through graduate school sold his soul to the devil, or that everyone who succeeded as a writer sold his soul to the devil, or that writing was the same as academia, but it was, there was no escape, everything must come to market, Robert Frost said, you can't avoid the marketplace, trade, what did Heap think he was, a gentleman? A man with an independent income?