Let me tell you something you haven't learned yet, something you learn only by living awhile. As you get older, you find that life begins to wear you down. Doesn't matter who you are or what you do, it happens. Experience, time, events - they all conspire against you to steal away your energy, to erode your confidence, to make you question things you wouldn't have given a second thought to when you were young. It happens gradually, a chipping away that you don't even notice at first, and then one day it's there. You wake up and you just don't have the fire anymore." He smiled.

We live out our lives as we are meant to live them-with some choice, with some chance, but mostly as a result of the persons we are.

What I want to write about has changed somewhat, and the scope of the storytelling has changed accordingly.

Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.

You shouldn't believe everything you hear you're young, not stupid.

Might have, could have, may have, should have—the haves and have nots reduced to pointless possibilities.

I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.