Normal' is a dryer setting.

What it boils down to is that parenting a child with autism is a difficult job; writing about it is far easier.

Sometimes I wonder how normal normal people are, and I wonder that most in the grocery store.

So when I got out of the military, I went back to school in biology, and earned a biology degree at the University of Texas, and then did some graduate work in it.

In a novel, I could submerge my ego in a characters and let his perceptions take over.

You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.

But in fantasy, you can make a complete break, and you can put people in a situation where they are confronted with things that they would not confront in the real world.