My daytime fantasies about the hero continued for years. His name was Delgado, because of my fascination with Spanish names at that time. These were not real stories, so much as events and episodes. As time passed, my hero became bigger, stronger, eventually a grotesque superhero, who wasn’t really super at all, just a teen-age boy’s wish-fulfillment fantasy. Eventually, after I had published other books, I wrote something long enough to be called a novel, and sent it to my agent. She rejected it, which was the right thing to do. 

Nonetheless, I decided to write a sequel, and then another, then revise the first book and try again. The sequels, hand-written on the back of wide-format computer paper — which I had been given since I couldn’t afford regular paper — amounted to about a hundred fifty thousand words each, and were so bad that, when I some years later looked at them again, I literally, not “figuratively,” could not read them. Some time after that, since I needed the shelf space, I threw the sequels out. Garbage is garbage after all, and after a while it begins to stink. The original story was rejected again, and now is lost. Maybe that’s just as well.