Miken
Active Member
We all want to make our marks in the world. Some use pee and some use the psychological equivalent of pee.
As Heinlein wrote “You have to give an editor something to change, or he gets frustrated. After he pees in it himself, he likes the flavor much better, so he buys it.”
We should note that when Heinlein was finally in a position, in the late 1970s, to demand that his work be published as is without editing that what got published was very noticeably inferior to what came earlier. BTW I read Stranger in a Strange Land in the early 1960s and the longer 'unedited' version in the 1990s. The originally published version is tighter and more focused. The reason I put scare quotes on 'unedited' is that this was not the original version but an intermediate version already subjected to editor 'pissing'.