I "started" as a fiction writer, publishing some short stories and a novel called Pride of the Bimbos in 1975. The novel was originally a movie in my head. I started with a couple scenes that I saw dramatically, saw the setting, imagined a certain graininess to the image, heard a country Western soundtrack compressed through a tinny jukebox speaker. But in 1975 I was working in hospitals and factories or was on unemployment, had no track record as a writer or movie-maker, had no connections whatsoever in the movie business. I hadn't even gone to film school. A practical look at the situation told me any screenplay I wrote was going to sit on the shelf for a long time, especially one about a white-trash kid, a midget shortstop and a six-foot-six black hustler with violent revenge on his mind. I began to rethink the story as fiction, mentally adapting it into a long, episodic short story that eventually became a novel. But the pictures and sounds were there first, and in the writing I did my best to give the reader the idea and the feeling of what I had first "seen."