Answer: Absolutely! Schools, bookstores, book clubs, bowling alleys, conventions---I do them all. If you're interested, email me. Please.
Frequently Asked Questions
Question: Do you do author visits?
Question: How much do you charge for your author visits?
Answer: For most schools, book clubs, and bookstores I charge nothing, nada, zip. For bowling alleys, conventions, museums, pizza parlors or other institutions of higher learning, there may be a small fee--but never more than $10,000,000.
Question: Are your visits even remotely interesting?
Answer: Depends on whether you consider having 100 laminated rejections slips flung at your head interesting. (If you don't, I can also talk about writing.)
Question: How long did it take you to write Anatopsis?
Answer: I started it in 1984, and it didn't get published until 2006. But, of course, I wasn't working on it that entire time. Still, if you condensed it all down and took away any breaks I took from it, it would still come out to about 5 years.
Question: 5 years! Are you the slowest writer on Earth?
Answer: I think so. Or at least in the top 10.
Question: Why did it take so long?
Answer: I was working 9 to 5 jobs at the time. Also, it was the first time I'd ever tried to write a novel. So there was a lot of trial and error. Plus, I sometimes waste a lot of time reading other people's books.
Question: What kind of trial and error?
Answer: Just about any you can imagine: plot problems, character problems, bad writing, overwriting, etc. The first draft of Anatopsis was over 600 pages. The final manuscript was 275 pages. That gives you an idea of how much I had to cut or change. (And no, I didn't just change the margins and reduce the font.)
Question: Where did you get the name "Anatopis"? Was that, like, your grandmother's?
Answer: It just came to me one night--I don't know how or from where. I thought it was a Greek word, but there weren't any easy ways to look it up back in 1984. So I figured I'd write the book first, then look up the word later. Finally, in about 2000, I looked it up and found there was no such word in Greek. (There's "thanatopsis," which is a meditation on death. But I knew that word even before I started the novel. So it wasn't a simple case of mistaken word identity.)
Question:Where are the rest of the questions?
Answer: They should be coming any day. I ordered them from AuthorQuestions R Us. But if you want to send me some free ones, just click on these blue letters here to email me.