Well, he would go off to the lab, and I would scribble away and type and read. I had written short little novels that were like bad dreams, and randomly I wrote to an agent and sent him one of my manuscripts, because I had enough shame in me to know I had to make money for myself. He said I had to have a genre. I couldn’t just write random stuff like that. He sent me copies of three “sweet nurse” books⁠—they were all about nurses who meet a man and fall in love, but there’s no sex⁠—and told me to give it a shot. So I sat down and wrote West Coast Nurse (1963). Vietnam Nurse (1966) was more demanding, because the war was still happening and I felt responsible for getting it right. After I moved to New York, I went to visit WACs at their offices in Manhattan and talked to them about what it was like. I learned a lot with those books about how you write a novel, like, What’s the subplot? What’s the top plot? I did it just by doing it. The editors never really even read the manuscripts, which is why I could get away with writing a Vietnam narrative where the Vietcong was the hero.