While digging out that 44-year-old Analog rejection letter I shared with you, I also ran across one of my own letters, sent just a few years later, which speaks to the ambitions of me at 19.
Because (as the letter reveals) I was trying to become George R. R. Martin’s publisher.
Back in 1975, when I was still living with my parents, flush with earnings from my new job at Marvel Comics, and feeling myself then to be more a part of comics than science fiction, I decided I’d start a publishing company which would do for comics what Advent Press was then doing for SF.
At the time, George had only published around a dozen short stories, had yet to come out with a novel, and I knew him best for his prose appearances in the pages of Star-Studded Comics, a fanzine out of Texas.
One such superhero adventure was “Powerman vs. the Blue Barrier,” which had appeared 10 years earlier.
I wrote the following letter to the publishers of Star-Studded attempting to get reprint rights.
I eventually received a letter from George—ONE I SADLY CANNOT LOCATE—in which (to the best of my recollection) he told me he thought it a swell idea, but that I’d omitted one very important aspect of the offer. That is—what did I intend to pay for said rights?
And that is where our correspondence stopped.
Because in between the time of my letter and his, my attention turned from being a publisher to being in a relationship with my future wife. I moved out from my parents’ apartment, got one my own, and any excess money went not to publishing but to living expenses and wooing the woman with whom I was falling love.
George is probably glad of this, because as he’s written—
And if by some mischance you should actually manage to stumble on some of these long-forgotten publications, please do remember that I was still in high school when I wrote most of this stuff.
But who knows what would have happened had I hitched my star to George R. R. Martin rather than Irene Vartanoff?