Sunset on the water ought to be a quiet and easy time, but I guess some people can't stand a little silence.

It's actually not very hard to re-set between the adult novels and the ones for younger readers. The narrative voices are very similar, the smartass attitude, the environmental battles. Kids love books that are irreverent and challenge authority, when authority is arbitrary, greedy or foolish. They also love it when you make fun of grownups, and I've spent my whole life as a writer doing that.

It's easy to get distracted by the vaudevillian aspects of the healthcare debate.

The Thieves of Manhattan is a sly and cutting riff on the book-publishing world that is quite funny unless you happen to be an author, in which case the novel will make you consider a more sensible profession-like being a rodeo clown, for example, or a crab-fisherman in the Bering Sea.

As frightening as this may sound, what you see in the books is the way I see the world. And so far I haven't seen anything, either in Florida or elsewhere, to dissuade me from it.

The TV commercials, which are endless and fairly crass, gave birth to Brock, the bad-lawyer character in Razor Girl. In real life you can find even sleazier examples than him.

Bangkok 8 is one of the most startling and provocative mysteries that I've read in years. The characters are marvelously unique, the setting is intoxicating and the plot unwinds in dark illusory strands, reminiscent of Gorky Park. Once I started, I didn't want to put it down.