Wally: First of all, I would quibble on how gifted I am or not. I always feel sort of apologetic about anything that I've written. I hate it when I'm giving a reading of a book that I've published, sometimes years before, and I hate it when people are sitting in the audience reading along from their copy of the book because I'm still fixing it in front of the microphone. I'm changing this and that and everything because I feel that my writing is imperfect. As far as how I started, I didn't want to be a writer. I talked to a lot of writers who were journaling when they were eight, nine years old. That wasn't me. I was too busy plopped in front of the TV watching things. I did always draw. I love drawing still. When I wasn't watching TV, I was drawing, and sometimes doing both at the same time. I think without realizing, that was my leg up into preparing to be a fiction writer. I wasn't really such a lonely kid, but I was a solitary kid. Occasionally, I would be cast in some fantasy thing that my sister and their friends would be -- one time, they were nurses at a hospital. They let me play with them so that I could be the patient and they could give me shots. They would stick comment pins into my arm and stuff like that. Other than that, I would kind of be an observer of their weird games and play.