GOLD MEDALS, TOP SECRET PROJECTS, AND DETECTIVE FICTION

(I'm not really here anymore. Most of the time I'm here. But I figured I'd check back in case anyone missed the memo.)

This September, Viking Children's Books will be publishing an adapted version of The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown's adult nonfiction bestseller. The adult book is fantastic. Really. Read it. But I'm especially excited about this new one because I had the pleasure of working with Mr. Brown, adapting and editing the text for young readers. It's the true story of an underdog crew from the University of Washington, a group of boys who rowed their way to the gold medal at the 1936 Olympics. The characters are unforgettable, and kids are going to absolutely love the story.

I'm also working on a double top secret project with another writer. He's a celebrity, too. The good kind, though. He's smart and funny and passionate about science.

Now, as for detective fiction...here are a few lines I read recently in a Ross MacDonald book, The Ivory Grin.

"Bent over a bin of oranges with my back to the street, I heard her heels on the pavement and felt her shadow brush me, like a cold feather.”

“Large-eared and almost hairless, his head seemed naked, as if it had been plucked. His long face was dimly lit by pale worried eyes. Deep lines of sorrow dragged down from the wings of his large vulnerable nose."

Sure, I could do without the "worried" eyes, the "lines of sorrow" and the "vulnerable" nose. That's kind of cheating, in my mind, when you feed the feeling to the reader. Bellow does this all the time, too, though, so I guess it's allowed. But what if those lines aren't sorrowful? What if this guy is wrinkled because he surfs all the time and gets too much sun? Then they'd be lines of peace and harmony. Criticism aside, I love the shadow as a cold feather above, and the idea that the guy's head looks like it had been plucked is just wonderful. I laughed out loud.

This last one is just plain weird, in a good way:

“His words were soft and insinuating, breaking gently like bubbles between his pink lips. His breath was strong enough to lean on.”

That's all for now.

The Alien in the Comic Book Store

You'd be surprised how difficult it can be to identify an alien. They don't simply trot out before you in their natural form, green, three-fingered, and slimy, with heads measuring at least as tall as their trunks. Last week, for instance, I saw one in a comic book store and he totally looked human. Average height. Sandy, messy hair. Wire-rim glasses. White. Early twenties.

So how did I know he was from another planet? He was moving around a little oddly, stopping and pretending to stare with interest at various items, but none of these behaviors really raised an alarm. Then he walked to the register with a box set DVD collection of the once popular television series Friends. That's when I knew.

Why would a fairly normal-looking young man buy the entire run of Friends? And why now, so long after its cultural moment has passed? Because he's an alien. And I can even tell you where he's from.

Last week, scientists also announced that they'd discovered the two closest habitable planets on record. A habitable planet is one that appears to have a reasonably friendly environment. So, for instance, Venus doesn't count. We'd burn if we tried to hang out there. And it wouldn't be terribly fun to breathe the air. These new planets, on the other hand, appear to be a little more human friendly. And they are roughly thirteen light years away. Which, as you know, is the distance covered by a beam of light traveling for thirteen years.

So here's what I think happened. Right around 2001, or the peak years of Friends, some of the NBC broadcast leaked out into space, racing right along at the speed of light. Thirteen years later, these broadcast waves struck the just discovered twin planets. The aliens, using inconceivably advanced technology, decoded the signals and converted them back into a view-able format. I don't know if they caught an entire episode, a whole season, or just a particularly moving or hilarious scene. My guess, though, is that the entire civilization was mesmerized. Immediately they needed to know what happened to Ross and Rachel, the former stars of the show. So they chose one brave explorer, programmed their wormhole for Earth, and tossed him inside. A few seconds or perhaps even days later I saw him, disguised as a young man, in the comic store. Disoriented, maybe. But focused. He did not wait long to grab that box set.

A Swell Way to Keep From Working

This past Tuesday, on my way to a microbiology conference, I spotted a man on the train wearing a t-shirt with the word “mentor” printed in large letters across the back. His pants had fallen down below his waist. The view was unpleasant, and I felt sad for his mentee.

Some takeaways from the conference: harmful bacteria can hang around on airplane tray tables, arm rests, and window shades for days; despite early evidence to the contrary, the microscopic bugs that can cause Legionnaire’s disease survive in windshield wiper fluid; we all need to open our windows more; there’s no difference in the fungal population of men’s vs. women’s public restrooms; never schedule phone interviews about quantum computing during microbiology meetings.

These past few weeks I’ve been interviewing experts on wearable medical technology, smart cars, snakes, and urban sensors, and mostly writing fiction. Here are a few recent articles:

An interview with Brett Doar, who builds Rube Goldberg machines for a living.

A story about a group of young engineers who built a more practical robotic arm.

This is an older one, about a Dalek builder, that I never got around to posting. My favorite anecdote, which did not fit in the final article: At meetings, Dalek builders sometimes sit inside their creations, drive around, and mingle with each other as alien robots. They even speak in Dalek screech.  

And a father and his giant Transformer costume.  

In between the writing and the talking, I helped my kids put together a pretty sick ninja turtle zip line in the backyard. Then we got to show it off to a friend of mine who was visiting Boston for the night on business. He was impressed, I think. My mental or intellectual relationship with this individual is kind of strange. When I lift my car keys to a subway turnstile or try to swipe a card to enter my house, I think of him. And when I write to him about one of these incidents, and the fact that he popped into my head after it happened, he agrees that he was the right person to tell.

He Appeared to be a Lunatic

A nest for hibernating bears. Courtesy Tim Laske

Often I dream about being able to breathe underwater. It always comes to me as a kind of revelation, as if it’s actually really simple, and our whole inability to breathe underwater as humans has been a matter of just not doing it right. The trick is to just sip the air out of the water through pursed lips. That’s all.

Anyway, this breathing vision is common, for me, along with the dreams about clean, surfing-worthy waves breaking on the street outside my house, or an office building, but a new one has popped up recently as well. In this new scenario, besides the breathing, I can also see very clearly underwater, as if I’m wearing goggles, and all I have to do is just open my eyelids very slightly at first, to form a kind of air bubble, and then gradually open them wider so that this bubble spreads, forming a kind of natural lens of air over my eyes.

The dream is so vivid that I’ve tried it a few times in the pool. And no, it does not work. But I’ll probably keep trying.

Last week, I was deep into a conversation about computer simulations with a very smart German scientist when he unexpectedly paused. “Greg!” he said after a moment.

“Yes?” I replied. I was worried he’d caught me zoning out.

“Don’t worry, Greg!  This is very difficult!  Even many of my colleagues have trouble understanding this research!”

I thanked him; apparently he sensed my confusion, and I was very grateful.  Scientists aren’t always that patient or understanding when explaining the intricacies of their work.  He does some fascinating research, too, so I’m glad he took the time to explain it, and I’ll point to the story in a future post, after it has been published. In the past few weeks I also spoke with a few toxicologists, a sports scientist in Norway, an odd pair of inventive gentleman who conspired to build a very unusual car, and a brilliantly offbeat artist who designs crazy Rube Goldberg machines. I can’t really discuss all the stories until they’re published, but here are a few other recent ones:

Tranquil Transformer

Teenager’s Submarine

Funky Alien River

Also, here’s an older one that I never linked to, and should have, since it does kind of pull together two of my passions, science and basketball. These scientists at Georgia Tech built a jumping robot and discovered that it’s more efficient for a robot to perform a short hop before a big jump. One of the engineers then noticed a video of the basketball star Kobe Bryant doing the same thing in a famous commercial. I don’t know that I’ve ever been able to reference the NBA in a science magazine before. So I was pretty excited.

This is even older, from earlier last year, but it was just so cool. The story is all about hibernation, but I was particularly excited about the bears. Apparently, they hibernate in giant nests. Yes, nests.

Imagine walking through the woods in the winter and stumbling across a massive pile of fur surrounded by a huge pile of brush and sticks? I’d probably start worrying that I’d stepped into an alternate universe and that some giant predatory bird was going to blame me for knocking its nest over and then come and pick me up and take me away. Of course, there’s always the chance that this bird would turn out to be friendly, and offer to give me rides to different places in exchanges for jokes or funny poems or beef jerky, in which case I would always try to keep one or a few of each on me at all times, so that if I was ever stuck, or just wanted to go somewhere nicer, or warmer, I could call my giant bird friends and get a ride.

Sorry...I thought I was writing about science. Now I’ve wandered into fiction again. So, while we’re here, or there, I’ve got a few great quotes from recent readings:

The Lonely Work and a Turtle Named Whitman

Am I done with the new novel? Yes! Absolutely. I'm done. Or at least I'm probably...sort of done. I mean, I think the characters are all there. The story moves. But the ending might need a little work, and there's a chapter in the middle that's probably a little too long, and I still don't know if I'm quite comfortable with the opening and...no, I'm not done. But I will be. Someday.

And I'll have these pages on the left to thank. The notebook was a gift. It's large and floppy, with a kind of faux leather cover, light brown, and newsprint-like paper inside. For a year I didn't write much in it because of the paper. I'm fairly particular about my paper. When I'm writing fiction by hand, I have to use either a legal pad, because my father writes on legal pads, or the thick, bumpy, really nice paper that comes in really nice notebooks. This one on the left was not up to par. Or so I thought. Then, a few weeks ago, I had the chance to see a rare first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass stashed away in the Providence Athenaeum. The paper was very similar to the stuff in my disrespected newsprint. There's a character in the novel who is found of Whitman, and a turtle named after the poet, too, so I took these little connections as signs, and put away the legal pad in favor of the floppy notebook. Plus, the paper is made in Japan and this novel is all about ninjas.

This week I spoke with engineers and scientists about cloud storage and the technological alternatives to testing new cosmetics and drugs on animals. These stories are not related. But they've got me thinking about sheep with too much lipstick and rouge grazing on the tops of clouds or maybe storing their excess makeup in these clouds so that their shepherd does not find them and use them himself. Or maybe they store their makeup in the clouds because they're afraid that if the shepherd finds them then he will realize they are smarter and more image-conscious than he thinks. He'll sit there under the stars and think, "Forget sheep-herding. There's no money in it. What I'll do is take these image-conscious sheep and go on the road. Start a song-and-dance show. With sheep!" Meanwhile, all the poor sheep want to do is hang out and graze and wear their makeup.

No, that's not right. I'll keep those stories separate.

Now for something completely different. Here's an NFL analyst and former quarterback, Trent Dilfer, talking about another quarterback, Terrell Pryor:

"He's putting in the lonely work that it takes to be successful at any position in this league."

The lonely work. I love that idea. And I think there's an element of lonely work to any pursuit or passion. The guy who plays quarterback in front of 80,000 people or the musician who sings before a packed stadium - they put in the solitary work to get to that crazy, crowded point. Unfortunately it appears that Pryor needs to put in quite a bit more lonely work, since he's not having a very good season.

From the NFL to the South African artist William Kentridge:

"There's always discovery in the making...the making has to be loose enough and open-ended enough for there to be a place for discovery."

And:

"In the work that I do there's a lot of place for not the unconscious but the non-planned to have a place and to lead to ideas...that's where the art comes from."

Scatalogical Stravinsky and the Taste of Crayons

This past weekend, at the Rhode Island Festival of Children’s Books and Authors, I had an amazing time talking with a bunch of great authors and illustrators. So, what do writers talk about when they hang out together? Books, naturally, and rainbow loom. And whether one should drop lemon wedges into glasses of water or just squeeze in the juice. And this guy, the Irish novelist Flann O'Brien, on the left. Another writer turned out to be a fan and I don’t often meet too many lovers of The Dalkey Archive. At one point, a few of us were stuck trying to remember the library song from Beauty and the Beast. That's when I knew I was with my kind of people. The author/illustrator Laurie Keller and I also had a great conversation about the necessity of working on your weird stuff, the art or writing out there on the fringes, which is often the material that keeps you inspired. So I’m going to spend a little time on the adventures of a character named Tim this week. He’s very odd.

Speaking of illustrators, a few months ago I met the artist Greg Hildebrandt, who, along with his brother, created the iconic Star Wars movie poster with Vader looming in the background. At the time I was actually interviewing an amazing kid named Justin Beckerman, who built his own one-person submarine, and kind of thinks with his hands. If Justin wants to understand how a motor works, he doesn’t look it up online. He takes the motor apart, moves things around, cleans different parts, replaces things, and then just gets it. The final story is here, and I probably could have written it without visiting, but I just had to meet this kid. Naturally, he was standing outside in his driveway taking apart a broken jet ski when I arrived (at night!), and it was quite a bonus when he took me next door to meet Hildebrandt, his neighbor.

The artist shared a few great stories about his youth, including the time he ate crayons because he wanted to know what the colors tasted like, and this little pearl of wisdom about creative work:

“It’s not all about inspiration. It’s about slow, steady, forward movement.”

Now on to the latest installment of Emersonian Reading Series. At the Providence Atheneaeum, a wonderful library, I read the first few pages of the famous composer Igor Stravinsky’s autobiography and found this delightful passage:

"...one of my earliest memories of sound will seem somewhat odd...I can see it now. An enormous peasant seated on the stump of a tree. The sharp resinous tang of fresh-cut wood in my nostrils.  The peasant simply clad in a short red shirt. His bare legs covered with reddish hair, on his feet birch sandals, on his head a mop of hair as thick and as red as his beard - not a white hair, yet an old man. He was dumb, but he had a way of clicking his tongue very noisily, and the children were afraid of him. So was I. But curiosity used to triumph over fear. The children would gather round him. Then, to amuse them, he would begin to sing. This song was composed of two syllables, the only ones he could pronounce...he made them alternate with incredible dexterity in a very rapid tempo. He used to accompany this clucking in the following way: pressing the palm of his right hand under his left armpit, he would work his left arm with a rapid movement, making it press on the right hand."

That's right, ladies and gentleman, one of history's greatest composers was drawn to music because of some guy making fart noises.

A nice image early in Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October:

"The water was coated with the bilge oil of numberless ships, filth that would not evaporate in the low temperatures and left a black ring on the rocky walls of the fjord as though from the bath of a slovenly giant."

A fragment from a great passage in one of Roberto Bolano’s big books:

"...and he dreamed that to escape the bullets he ducked underwater and let himself be carried along by the current, coming up only to breathe and going under again, and in this way he traveled miles and miles of river, sometimes holding his breath for three minutes or four or five..."

And here’s the Irish playwright JM Synge, in his memoirs of time spent on the Aran Islands, noting what sounds very much like an early minimalist running trend:

"Michael walks so fast when I am out with him that I cannot pick up my steps, and the sharp-edged fossils which abound in the limestone have cut my shoes to pieces. The family held a consultation on them last night, and in the end it was decided to make me a pair of pampooties, which I have been wearing today among the rocks. They consist simply of a piece of raw cowskin, with the hair outside, laced over the toe and round the heel with two ends of fishing-line that work round and are ties above the instep."

Is anyone surprised the Irish were early proponents of minimalist running, though? They invent everything first.

Finally, after much internal reflection, I have arrived at an answer to a question a budding writer named John posed to me earlier this year during a school visit: How do you research a subject that is entirely fictional? So, to back up, in my talks I stress the importance of becoming an expert in whatever subject you happen to be writing about. Cryptography or baking supply chain logistics, for example. But John was confused because he wanted to write about mages and mages don’t really exist. To most people, anyway. So when John first asked me the question, I suggested gathering as much information as he could from other works of fiction.

Now I’ve got a better idea. John, you might not like this, as it does mean more work, but I think you have to write the book you would need to read to write your book. Hmmm....let's try that again. So, to become an expert on an imaginary person, place, or thing, you have to really think through and flesh out that subject. If you want to write a book about an alien planet, you have to build that planet in your head. As for mages, I’d at least sketch out The Complete History of Mages or Mages 101 or The Guide to Becoming a Mage, or maybe even all three, before you start writing your book. Look at that Rowling lady. The imaginary book Tales of Beedle the Bard became so real in her head that she actually sat down and wrote it out!

Sorry if that’s disappointing John, but I could tell you were a bright kid, so I’m sure you’re capable. 

Oh, and in other news, I found out one of my articles from last year was cited as a kind of honorable mention in the Best American Science & Nature Writing 2013. So that's nice.

The Selective Rendering of Otherwise Disparate Materials

On Monday night, after an insane thunderstorm, a strangely beautiful yellow light shone in through the windows around dusk. The houses and trees across the street get the best light at that hour so I went outside to look at them. The yellow light was everywhere and the most incredible rainbow arched perfectly across the sky. This rainbow was thick. Honestly. If I had a spoon with a long enough handle I'm convinced I could have scooped some out. Would it have tasted like sherbet?

I don't know, but every single color of the spectrum was clearly delineated. The sky inside the arch was bright blue and to the right of the right arm of the rainbow it was several shades darker. There was a faint second rainbow as well, which you can kind of see in the photo above. So I grabbed the half-sleeping kids out of bed and they asked if we’d find a pot of gold. Which reminds me...

Both of my daughters found a four leaf clover this week. One through determination, the other through luck.  

I stumbled across a great cartoonist. His work is here.

At night I’ve been reading the Irish writer Edna O'Brien’s memoir, Country Girl. It’s wonderful so far. I became stuck on this sentence, though: "It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it." I really wanted her to add another “I” before “feared it.” But that would alter the meaning; she had probably come face to face before and not feared it.

Her recollections of a farmhand named Carnero are wonderful.

The illustrator Katherine Roy and I are working to come up with some titles for the soda bottle book. The working title had been BOTTLE OF POP. But that does not get to the fantastic journey element of the story. So we’re still thinking.

In doing some research for the ninja novel I read an incredible story about an ancient samurai. It’s at the end of a battle. This samurai sees another warrior fleeing across the river. He calls him a coward and challenges him to stay and fight. The other warrior comes back. The samurai defeats him and sees that he is barely older than a boy and resembles his son. He wants to let him go, but other samurai are coming. They will kill the boy if he does not. So the samurai kills him, granting him a more noble death. Then he looks inside the young warrior’s satchel and finds a flute. He retires his sword and never kills again.

That’s how I remember it, anyway. I could have messed up some little details, but the one I clearly remember is the flute. Who would think he’d find a flute? It’s such a gentle, peaceful, human object. And it really shows the power of detail in a story.   

Sometimes when I become derailed at the computer, and find myself reading something unrelated to the task at hand, I close my eyes and remain in place for five or ten seconds. That usually works. Soon enough I refocus.

During one of these derailments I found an amazing story from 1966 about Celtics legend Bill Russell redesigning the basketball shoe and insisting it be affordable. What a change from today’s stars. He even redesigned the tread on the bottom to make it easier to stop short. The sports world needs more people like him. 

And a few quotes from the week’s readings...

A biography of TS Eliot by Peter Ackroyd:

“Eliot could, as it were, pick up a poem where he had left off. He had an extraordinary gift of synthesis so that what seems to be one poetic persona, or one melodic shape, is in fact the result of compression and the selective rendering of otherwise disparate materials.”

A few years ago I met the writer Louis Auchincloss and he told me he had the same ability. He could work on a story while sitting in court, waiting for his case to be heard, then switch into lawyer mode when his turn came, and promptly pick the story back up where he left off while riding the subway back to his office. I’m not so lucky. It takes me some time to return to the world of the story if I’ve been away.

45. “Then in the summer of this year he travelled to Munich, where he completed ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ He transcribed it into his notebook and then forgot about it. Conrad Aiken said that he had been ‘heartlessly indifferent to its fate.’”

Ah, but this makes sense! He wrote something great. He was satisfied. He expelled the story and the idea and the emotion from his head and his heart and got it all down on the page. When you do that well enough, publishing is an afterthought. It’s business. It’s nothing.

And a quote from Dr. Seuss, from the book The Cat Behind the Hat:

"If I can be of influence to one child in this great vice-ridden country, my life, I feel, has not been lived in vain.”

Experimenting with Voice

Last week, while getting ready to teach a class, I was trying to think of a way to explore that elusive quality of voice in great writing. Not voice as in Cee Lo, but as in Louis Menand's notes on the topic in this review. A powerful narrative voice should be recognizable regardless of who is reading the text aloud. Right? My eldest, a first grader, has been improving as a reader, so I asked her to recite a passage from one of my current favorites. Then I played it in class. One of the participants guessed it immediately. Anyone else?
 

Androids, Elephants, and the Magic of the Alphabet

The Andover Bookstore hosted a wonderful event a few weekends ago. I was lucky enough to join Jennifer Jacobson, author of Small as an Elephant, and Ben Winters of The Mystery of the Missing Everything and the Tolstoy remix Android Karenina. Thankfully Ben also dragged a few of his children in with him; normally I’m the only one trailing kids.

Each of us read from one of our novels, then took questions from the very engaged, interested audience of young readers and parents. The young Tom Brady’s points about my title, Dangerous Waters, were especially astute, and thanks to Serene for the lovely drawing of Emily!

Chris Rose, an elementary school teacher who also runs the children’s section of the store, delivered a wonderful introduction about the magic of writing; the strange power of the 26 letters of our alphabet, and how, in certain combinations, they can generate such vivid characters and scenes, such real emotions in the minds and hearts of readers. After his introduction, I sure was glad that Jennifer Jacobson went first. Talk about pressure!

If you’re ever passing through north of Boston, stop by the Andover Bookstore. It is truly a singular place, a testament to the importance of independents, and I hope to return soon.

Newburyport Literary Festival

A few weeks ago I was a guest author at the Newburyport Literary Festival up along the coast of Massachusetts. It's a beautiful old brick town on a river, just south of some popular surfing spots in New Hampshire. I drove up to one of them early that Saturday morning with my board in the back of the car, hoping to paddle out, only to arrive at the beach and realize I'd forgotten my wetsuit. Whoops.

The festival, now in its seventh year, was great fun. A whole bunch of smart, attentive kids came to listen to me talk about writing, reading, and FISH at Newburyport's beautiful public library; I'm amazed they sat through it on a beautiful Saturday afternoon.

The kids definitely appeared to be budding writers - they asked incredibly sharp questions - and the adults were fun too. I especially enjoyed the grandmother kept questioning me, doubting that I really make a living as a writer.

The festival was also a nice chance to meet some other writers, including the great Rodman Philbrick, author of Freak the Mighty. I'd never read the book, but I whipped through it after hearing him speak, and it's one of the best I've read in a while. The narrative voice is incredible, and there's so much happening behind the words.

Listening to Elisha Cooper discuss his books and art was also a real pleasure. I'm looking forward to reading a few of his works to my kids.

There were numerous adult authors in attendance as well, but honestly, who wants to listen to grown-ups? I'll take sixty-year-old kids any day.

The Festival happens every April, I believe, and it's free. If you're in New England, check it out next year.

Pirates and the Liar's Paradox

A few weeks ago I visited Munsey Park School in Manhasset, NY, and spoke with a number of classes about FISH and the writing process. When I was talking to a group of second-graders, one of the kids caught on early that I have a tendency to embellish when telling stories. I'd been talking about my journalism (all true stuff) and my fiction (mostly invented). So he raises his hand, I stop, and he asks, "Was what you just said true?"

I'd been talking about sitting in a flying car, but I wasn't making it up. I wrote about the car, Terrafugia's Transition, which is really a drivable plane, in Popular Science. I explain this to the inquisitive kid, then add a qualifier, noting that I do often make things up.

"So how do we know what's true?" he asks.

"You can ask me," I answer, "but you shouldn't trust my answer, because I've already said that I make things up." He looks at me strangely, and then I get carried away. "You've actually brought up a really interesting and famous philosophical question known as the liar's paradox....."

The teacher laughed slightly, I went on for a moment more, and then quickly returned to stories of sword fights, treasure hunts, and smelly rogues.

Cleveland Elementary

5th graders are bright. I visited Cleveland Elementary School in Norwood, Massachusetts, two weeks ago to talk about FISH, journalism, writing in general. At one point, one of the kids posed a great question.

"If you've written something that you think is great, but your friend reads it and says it's really bad, do you listen to your friend?"

My answer was a little long and winding, but I basically said that you have to think about your friend's critique, and consider whether there might be any truth to it, but ultimately you have to listen to yourself. I added that you should never take the first person's word. You're better off waiting for a whole bunch of people to tell you that you're terrible before you start thinking about believing them.

After class, one of the kids caught me in the hall. He was nervous, maybe a little annoyed. He summarized what I'd said with regards to criticism, then pointed out a contradiction. Earlier in the class, when another kid asked me whether I was an artist, I answered that I'm not very good, then cited the fact that a very skilled illustrator once told me exactly that.

The kid recounted this story about my artistic skills, then said, "You contradicted yourself! Maybe you're not such a bad artist after all."

A budding lawyer, perhaps.

The Balch School

A group of Balch Elementary School third-graders and I had a great time talking about books, writing, pirates, and FISH in the packed school library. A few miniature journalists in the class came prepared with questions. Here's a sample:

"Did you always want to be a writer?"

No, I said, I wanted to be in the NBA. They laughed.

"Did you play sports when you were younger?"

Yes: lacrosse, basketball, football, swimming. This answer generated numerous high-fives.

"Did you write Twilight?"

No, and you can tell by my car.

"Is Fish a series?"

Not yet....but of course I have plans for him!