I got hooked on TV westerns back in the early sixties when I was about five, mostly because my brother was addicted to them and wouldn't let me watch anything else.

I love the mystery, the reconstruction of history, and the way past and future define each other.

I grew up thirty miles down the highway in San Marcos, and I've still got family there, so I guess I'm pretty well rooted.

In middle school I wrote a paper on Hemingway and none of the sentences had more than five words.

When Larry Wright won the Pulitzer for The Looming Tower we all strutted around for weeks, until some sourpuss among us noted that it was actually Larry, and not the rest of us, who won the prize.

When I started escaping to a neighbor's house to watch what I darn well pleased, it turned out to be The Big Valley. Every afternoon my friend and I would pour grape juice over mounds of ice cream and settle in to see what was happening with Barbara Stanwyck and Linda Evans and the boys in The Big Valley.

Promised Lands was a better book in my opinion, and it's still my mother's favorite of the three I've done, but I doubt anyone who isn't a blood relative has ever heard of it. Which is to say expectations aren't worth much in the book world.