I probably had a very idealized view of what college should be. I thought, “I’ll take a little psychology. I’ll take some philosophy and this and that.” Of course, we all have to declare a major eventually, and when that time came, I really didn’t hesitate to declare marine science emphasis in biology at Berkeley.
That was great. I felt very comfortable doing that. I spent summers at marine labs like Bodega Bay in northern California, or Friday Harbor Marine Lab up in Pugent Sound. After I graduated, I was determined to get a job in biology because I knew there weren’t many jobs like that and I really wanted to work in the field I’d studied. I think I applied for 30 jobs my senior year, and I only got offered one of them and it was for the California Department of Fish and Game, basically going along the east side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains electro-shocking fish. We’d go into these streams with these huge backpack electro-shockers and we’d just zap these fish and they’d float up and you’d catch them and count them and weigh them, and then turn them loose again.
I did this field work for about four months; but really by the end of that, I was realizing that I probably didn’t want to continue biology as a career. Not only because I saw how demanding physically it could be in the field, but also the kind of biologist I wanted to be no longer existed. I wanted to be a biologist like you might’ve had 50, 60 years ago where you could just go out and look at anything you wanted, and there was not this huge pressure to publish or to specialize. I knew I really didn’t want to specialize in just one thing the rest of my life.
It was really while I was working for Cal Fish and Game that I just decided one day — oh, I’ll be a writer. I had no idea what I wanted to write at first. I tried some short stories. I took a screen-writing class and wrote a really bad screen play. I wrote an adult novel that was equally awful, but I also really knew I needed a way to support myself, too. My stepfather — one of the best things he ever did for me was suggest this masters in Scientific Instrumentation Program at UC Santa Barbara. The great thing about this program is they actually trained you to do something practical. Basically they taught you how to take individual computer components and build instruments with it.
Well, I knew I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t have any aptitude for it, but I learned enough to get good at troubleshooting computers and I learned how to program computers. I was lucky enough to get a job after that as a computer consultant for a biologist at UC Santa Barbara. This was a perfect situation for me because now I could continue to hang in there with biologists and learn about their work, but I also could make enough money to write. Whenever I got a raise at work, I would cut my hours so I could write more. Fortunately I had a boss who knew what I was up to and wasn’t really opposed to that. Tt also gave me a wealth of contacts and material for writing.
After a couple of years, I thought, “Maybe I should try writing some science for young people.” I wrote this little science article about this deep sea shrimp called “nathathousiate” (ph.) and I sent it in to Highlights for Children magazine. Got a very nice letter back telling me all the things that were wrong with it, but they would like to see it again if I could improve it. I revised it and I sent it into them again. Three months later they rejected it again. Well, it took me about two years to sell that one little science article, but that was really the beginning of my whole science writing career.