About the Author

I was always a writer. I still have my first book, composed entirely in crayon. It features my dog Spook, a weimaraner who stood as tall as a horse and possessed the intelligence of processed cheese. Spook made a big impression on me, sometimes by knocking me senseless with his thick skull. I remember when he plucked the steak my father had just grilled for dinner off the kitchen counter and downed it in just a few bites right in front of us. As an older child, there was a time when I would be the first one home after school. I'd sneak up the gravel driveway, tiptoeing across the crunching stones so as not to alert the beast, then storm into the house and run straight for the kitchen. Spook went absolutely bananas when I would come home--gnawing on furniture got dreadfully tedious for him during school hours--and he was large enough to inflict significant damage while celebrating my return. So, I would leap up onto the kitchen table just ahead of him, nibble leftover pretzels from my brown bag lunch and wait for Spook to do his 97 laps around the kitchen table before I would venture down and let him out the front door, tongue lagging, exhausted.

My next book was from first grade. It borrowed dangerously from Beverly Cleary's The Mouse and the Motorcycle books, but the publisher of that series never complained. My favorite writing project, though, was one I undertook with my great-grandfather Bamp Bill. He was something of a writer himself, mostly family tales that would become treasures to us once he had passed on. He and I began a detective novel when I was 10 wherein I would write one chapter, and he would write the next. I sorely wish I had kept it up for longer.

Mostly I grew up in Rome, New York, a small town near the center of the state. We lived outside the center of the town, near the edge of a large reservoir lake and acre upon acre of unclaimed woods. Nicely worn paths wound their way through those woods, and along those paths my friends and my older brother and I would careen on our bicycles, jumping over roots, rocks and each other. Over the course of a few seasons, we secreted away hatchets from the garages of our homes and worked diligently at building a log house deep in those woods at the edge of the lake. Armed with our inadequate tools, my friends and I hacked at huge pine trees far larger than your average telephone pole. When one finally gave way after hours of work, the slow-motion arc of descent was utterly thrilling. It was nuts, of course, stupidly dangerous, but this was back in the day when parents did not yet feel the need to watch kids all that closely, and kids took full advantage of the neglect. My friend Eric cut perfect notches in the sections we created from the felled trees so that layers of logs fit together just like the Lincoln Logs that we had recently abandoned back in our homes. We only got about two layers high on our log cabin, but I can still attest that it w

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