An Evening With an Old Friend

One of the challenges of writing this third book is that I am doing so in what is, inescapably, the 21st century.

The first two books were written in the 21st century as well, but I had the luxury of ignoring that fact. I wrote them both largely as if I were still living in the 20th century, using tools and techniques I had used back in my newspaper days – recording interviews on microcassette recorders and using a process that involved giant stacks of paper, for example. It was an approach that was comfortable, and I stuck with it.

But nearly a quarter way through this new century, starting a new book from scratch, I found myself dragged kicking and screaming into the present. As much as I'd like to ignore it, the world is digital.

And so, a couple of years ago, I found myself facing the reality of doing my first interview as an author with an iPhone instead of a tape recorder. I was daunted, and I needed a guinea pig – someone that would be patient if I proved utterly incompetent to the task.

I asked Andy.

Andy Schorr had a story I wanted to include in the book, but he was also a friend, and I felt decent he would indulge me being bad at the interview. A couple of summers ago, when I was just getting started, I went over to his house and we talked about revolutionary solid rocket motors while I fumbled through starting and stopping and restarting my apps until I had everything working.

Afterward, I promptly started turning the interview into prose, and it became some of the first material in the new book that gave me confidence that this concept was actually going to work.

Less than a year later, the cancer Andy had battled for so long finally got the better of him, and he was gone. I miss him a lot.

Fast forward to this past week. At the end of that interview, Andy had told me another short story. It didn't fit in with the main one. It was a good story, but I didn't know yet where it was supposed to go.

After a lot of writing, I finally got to a point this week where I realized where it went. I pulled up the transcript and audio of the interview to get to work. I hit play on my phone, and Andy's voice began speaking, the first time I'd heard it in way too long. I listened to his story and added it to the book and was grateful for one more evening with him.

And that, as much as anything, is why I write these books.

It's important to me to preserve the history. It's important to me that decades from now, people will still have access to stories about pioneering moments of humanity's first forays into space, will still able to look back at how things were done when those first steps were taken.

But it's also important to me to be a part of those one-more-evening's. I owe so much to Owen Garriott. I miss him, too. But I'm glad to be part of people being able to hear his stories in Homesteading Space.

I don't know that there's another book with Andy in it, but as long as this one's out there, people will be able to spend that same little bit of time enjoying his knowledge and passion and sense of humor. He's a good guy to spend time with.