I write about times and places I would visit in a time machine, like ancient Rome or the Wild West.
Like every child growing up in America, I read 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn.' I liked them well enough, but I didn't love them.
When I was nine, we moved to Stanford University in San Francisco so that my father could do a Ph.D. I went to Terman Junior High in Palo Alto. It was terrible, because my hormones were all over the place, and I became an ugly adolescent full of rage and loathing.
