Growing up in the '70s and '80s, science fiction and especially fantasy had such a stigma attached to them. I felt so punished and exiled for being devoted to these things.

When I left college I thought - based on a staggeringly inadequate understanding of how the world worked - that I might like to go into book publishing.

The year after I graduated college I had a job in a library. When people underlined passages in the library books, or made notes in the margins, the books were sent to me. I erased the lines and the notes. Yes, that was my job.

Which is the healthier kind of literary diversity: an un-gate-kept self-published book world, run substantially through Amazon? Or our current book world, which is part-gate-kept, part-not, with many different publishers and retailers and platforms? I'm not smart enough to figure it out, but if I had to guess I'd guess the latter.

I watched my mom and dad build everything that matters - a family, a home and a good name.

I was a lower middle-class kid. My family had no money. There was no room in our small house where there were already four kids, including myself, living.

I married a woman from New Orleans, so I had family here. Post-Katrina, I had a number of friends call me up and say they wanted to do something to help the community - not just Habitat for Humanity or Red Cross, we've done that, but what can we do for the community.

I was born in Colorado and grew up in Pennsylvania with family in Texas and Oklahoma.