At the end of 8th grade, when I had gotten my story back from Mrs. Mecham, she suggested I write it into a book during the summer. That’s exactly what I decided to do. I had been fleshing out the story of the Judakatrupians for a long time. I was fourteen at the time. I had originally thought of some elements of the story when I was four years old. Of course I updated some of the names, though. At age four a conical building that was jet black and which flew the scull and crossbones as its flag and was called The Clamp, now became Judakatrupian Space Force Headquarters. What I called the planet Dong Ding when I was eight years old, now became the Planet Orbitralas. Obviously, a huge space ship called the Dong Ding International which carried over 20,000 people, and was built by cowboys in the nineteenth century became the Orbitralas International and was built by Judakatrupians on Earth in 1961.
Good old teletype paper. I knew if I wanted to write a book, I had to have lots of paper. So I used those rolls of teletype paper and cut several hundred sheets to the 8 ½ by 11 inch size and punched holes in them so they would fit in a thick binder. Then I started to write. I wrote that whole summer. I wrote and wrote. In the summers before, I had watched a lot of television. I may have even been bored at times. Not the summer of 1976! I was very busy. I found that if I had music playing, I generally wrote better, faster, and more efficient. I used to crank up my stereo and listen to classical music while I was writing a book, writing music, or doing anything else in my room. Some parents complain about their children listening to load rock music. My parents generally had to tell me to turn down, Handel’s Messiah. In the summer of 1976, particularly inspiring to me was to listen to Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra while I was writing the first version of my book, Three Brothers Three Nations.
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