Arriving on American shores this month, escorted by ecstatic reviews, is Fire Bringer, an epic animal fantasy in the tradition of Watership Down. This first novel by 36-year-old travel writer David Clement-Davies was published in England last year as a children’s book, but here in the U.S. it will be treated more as a crossover title.

This 500-page saga of the lives and society of the Herla, as the red deer call themselves, ranges from private domestic moments to heroic battles, from rival herd-leaders’ secret machinations to ancient prophecies of a deer with a blaze on his forehead shaped like an oak leaf. (Many readers will immediately think of Harry Potter’s lightning-shaped scar, which likewise marks him for future heroism.) No matter how far we think we have come from the superstitious artists who painted animals on cave walls, we are still moved by heroic tales of our fellow creatures. Is it because we intuit deep down that they and we are closer than we think? Whatever the rational explanation for this affinity, David Clement-Davies has tapped into its exotic power.

We reached the author at his home (and office) in London. Clement-Davies is already hard at work on his next book — about wolves — but he well remembers the amount of work that went into Fire Bringer. "Overall it took about three years to write, on and off. I had the idea quite a long time before, actually. I was sort of wondering what to do, especially after leaving university. I wanted to write, but I wasn’t sure how to set about that. Eventually I went on and became a travel journalist." Today he climbs mountains, scuba dives, sky dives, and writes up his adventures for various periodicals.

Not surprisingly, many of Clement-Davies’s own favorite books as a child — and, for that matter, as an adult — were animal fantasies. "Watership Down is a favorite book," he says, acknowledging the most frequent comparison with his own first novel. "Going further back, the sort of greats like The Jungle Book. And there are other books which are more demanding — The Call of the Wild, White Fang, The Wind in the Willows."

Therefore, he says, "I had a sense of the type of book I’d like to write." However, he knew he didn’t want to follow too closely in the footsteps of Richard Adams. "Before I got into the book, I thought about deer. They appealed for their mystery and — I don’t know how to say this — they’re rather more exciting animals than rabbits." Deer seem more mystical, more historical — and of course the stags, unlike male rabbits, are heavily armed, which offers dramatic possibilities in a story fraught with rivalry and deception.

Clement-Davies did a great deal of research into the lives of red deer. "Reading about deer is fascinating. You have this unique thing, which is the antler cycle, which makes them for me somehow stranger. While writing the fantasy, I was wrestling back and forth — wanting to make these creatures realistic, too."

Paradoxically, the details of the deer’s natural history — birth, growth, death — somehow "humanize" the creatures. We empathize with them because they go through the same cycles of life that we do, and because they respond to these cycles in the same ways we do — with fear, joy, dread, excitement.

Clement-Davies didn’t want to set his fantasy in a Never-Never Land of animals without a human presence. "I wanted to set people together with animals and see what I could do with that. And that gives me the basic tension." The presence of marauding humans — one of the chief predators always lurking on the outskirts of deer society — affects every scene. For example, most of the deer accept the humans’ Hunt as an inevitable part of life in the Park, and even encourage each other to sacrifice themselves for the good of the herd. Naturally, any deer who imagines a life outside the Park faces cries of heresy and revolution.

Clement-Davies pauses to think over the issues intertwined with his story. "I knew when I set out — you obviously have lots of ideas swirling around in your head, but you don’t quite know where they’ll take you — I knew I wanted to write about people, and about human issues. Actually very big themes such as fascism." The emotional roots of fascism, and the way in which individuals manipulate the society around them toward their own sad goals, is one of the ongoing themes.

Clement-Davies credits his agent, Gina Pollinger (who was also Roald Dahl’s agent), with giving him "the holy touch" and telling him, "You’re a writer." Clement-Davies remembers, "That sent a little shiver down my spine. When you begin to talk of yourself as a ‘writer,’ it gives you a kind of new authority. You don’t feel such a sham anymore, going into a pub and saying, ‘I’m a writer.’"

If Fire Bringer proves as popular in the U.S. as it did in England, Clement-Davies won’t have time to wonder if he’s a writer. Too many people will be reading his books.

Michael Sims’s next book will be a natural and cultural history of the human body for Viking.

Author photo by Tim Booth.

Wizards are typically portrayed as mysterious and secretive beings, but readers now have a chance to enter their enchanted world. With Tom Cross' The Way of Wizards, the curious can embark on a magical journey led by the author's alter ego, an apprentice mage named Penelo.

Lavishly illustrated, The Way of Wizards is a full-color, large-format book that uses more than 200 illustrations to depict the fantastical world of wizards. Penelo, as narrator, describes everything from a wizard's garb to elemental sources of power to the enchanted places that are a wizard's realm. At times, the book resembles a tome from a wizard's library.

Wizards is a project Cross began nearly 20 years ago, at a time when books on otherworldly creatures like gnomes and fairies were wildly popular. "We had pursued the idea of doing a wizards book, and then as things go, they said the market went soft,' he explains. Cross, a noted ecologist and artist whose work has been exhibited in galleries from Florida to Japan, continued to produce magically themed art until wizardry caught the public's imagination again, in part due to the phenomenal popularity of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Cross believes that other factors also led to the resurgence of interest in magic.

"Fantasy seems to be an outlet during good times and a safe harbor during poor times."

"Fantasy seems to be an outlet during good times and a safe harbor during poor times,"  he says, noting that Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien wrote much of his Middle Earth saga during the 1930s and '40s times of worldwide turbulence. As he researched wizards and mages for his book, Cross noted a recurring theme of harmony with nature that resonated with his background as a coastal ecologist. "A lot of what's in this book is researched folklore,"  he explains, "and every culture has its take on nature's phenomenon that couldn't be explained, and they almost always point their finger at a gnome or a fairy or a shaman or a witch doctor or a medicine man. If you think about it, every culture has wizards, whatever they call them. It's usually been the guy or the woman who was most in tune with nature."

In striving to synthesize magical legends from many cultures, Cross accessed material through the Internet, which jibed with his vision of the magical tome. "I had a very wild hair about the book basically being the material version of the real thing, a two-dimensional version of what's real,"  he said. What would a real wizard's book consist of? "It'd be hypertext, interactive, click here, click there, every word takes you somewhere, every image takes you somewhere. The Web is probably the best manifestation we have of what wizardly communication really would be."

Just as a wizard combines elements for a spell or potion, Cross blended ancient technique and modern technology to produce the images in his book. "The book is a very interesting evolution of technique, he explains. "The early stuff and particularly the things that are on the old book pages are handwritten or pencil and watercolor, and the major art pieces are all digitally done. So I pretty much have evolved as technology has allowed me to. Cross wrote some of the text in a page layout program that let him combine words with images and manipulate their appearance.

"It was neat. The page, the spread, became my palette, he said. "It was a bit of wizardry in that sense.

Gregory Harris is a writer and computer consultant in Indianapolis.

How can a painter create a portrait of a model he never actually sees? That question is at the center of Jeffrey Ford’s fascinating new novel, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque. Set like Caleb Carr’s The Alienist in 1890s New York, Ford’s book is a masterpiece of suspense. But unlike The Alienist, which used actual historical characters, The Portrait relies for the most part on the author’s imagination. And what an imagination it is! Ford has honed his creative voice in a rich outpouring of short stories and novels, including the unique allegorical trilogy, The Physiognomy, Memoranda and The Beyond. The first book in the trilogy won the 1998 World Fantasy Award.

Ford’s latest novel takes place in the top tiers of New York society in 1893. Piero Piambo, an artist slumming as a portraitist, is hoping to make enough money to allow him to paint what he wants although he’s not at all sure what that might be. The Portrait kicks into gear when Piambo is given a mysterious and high-paying commission: to paint the eponymous Mrs. Charbuque. The job has one difficult condition, however; he must paint her without ever seeing her. Piambo cannot resist the challenge and is soon attempting to paint Mrs. Charbuque (who sits in the same room with him, but behind a curtain) while listening to her strange tales. As Piambo becomes obsessed with finding out the truth behind Mrs. Charbuque and her increasingly strange and frightening stories, he lets own life, his friends and his lover, Samantha, a beautiful actress, slip out of his hands. Painting an unseen subject is a captivating idea that sprang from Ford’s own experience as a reader. I see the characters of a novel in my mind, he said in a recent interview. They take on features, hair color and expressions, and bulk and height, becoming real individuals. When Piambo tries to see Mrs. Charbuque in his mind, the image keeps changing. I want the reader to have the same experience as Piambo is having as he tries to decipher her looks form her words, Ford says.

The author faced another challenge in creating the novel: how could he convey a painter at work or the beauty of a painting so that it would feel real to the reader? To solve this dilemma, Ford interviewed painters and read up on the subject particularly in James Elkin’s insightful book, What Painting Is. He also used his own experience as a painter in the Henry Miller school of paint what you like and die happy.’ One aspect of writing the novel came easily to Ford the setting. A New York-area native with a long-standing interest in local history, he grew up on Long Island and as a child was often taken into Manhattan. He later worked in the city, and he and his family now live within easy reach of New York in South Jersey, where he teaches English at Brookdale Community College. Despite his local background, Ford spent considerable time researching the New York of 1893. He discovered just how much difference 109 years makes: coffee cost less than a penny; an all-naked review in the name of high art was popular (although it didn’t last long); and many of the buildings of the period are long gone. However, not everything he discovered made it into the book; otherwise he’d never have finished. As his editor pointed out, a little research goes a long way.

Although he made his name as a fantasy author, in The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, Ford handles the mystery genre with apparent ease, building suspense right from the start when Piambo is handed a note by a blind man. Ford says his primary goal in writing the novel was to see how far his character would go to successfully paint his unseen subject. As Piambo is drawn deeper and deeper into the mystery behind the curtain, the novel moves from one climax to the next, slowly and skillfully increasing the tension so that as the ending nears, the reader, like Piambo who lives for the stories and will do almost anything to find out more about Mrs Charbuque has to know what happens. Gavin J. Grant lives in Brooklyn with the usual overload of books.

The storyline of Denise Giardina’s new novel, Fallam’s Secret, features time travel, an orphaned heroine and a love story punctuated by sex lots of sex.

It seems at first a departure for Giardina, a West Virginia author best known for serious historical fiction, including Saints and Villains, her acclaimed 1998 novel about the life of Nazi resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer. A closer examination of Fallam’s Secret reveals threads of serious themes, but it’s clear the author is mostly enjoying herself in this first book of a new series.

“It was just so much fun,” Giardina says during an interview in Charleston, West Virginia, where she lives and teaches writing. “I finally reached the point where I thought, you know, I don’t have to prove anything writing some big, heavy, serious thing anymore. Saints and Villains took a lot out of me.” Fallam’s Secret tells the fascinating story of Lydde, a West Virginia woman who goes back in time. “She’s an actress and she’s been living in England for a long time but she comes home because she thinks the uncle who raised her has died,” Giardina explains. “She ends up in the Mystery Hole, which has a wormhole under it, and she goes back in time.” A wormhole, in theory, is a space tunnel where time behaves differently. Giardina based the setting of the Mystery Hole on a real tourist attraction near the New River Gorge in West Virginia. “The gorge itself has always seemed very mysterious to me. It just popped into my head that it would be fun to have the Mystery Hole be the site of one of the wormholes.” Part of Lydde’s adventure is traveling through time as a 55-year-old woman and emerging in 1657 with a 20-something body. Giardina’s other books contain sex scenes, but she acknowledges these are more explicit. “I try to do different things in each book and this was something I decided to explore it’s supposed to be hard to write, so I wanted to try it. I also wanted to show sex as a beautiful thing and to show married sex as explicitly erotic and to challenge the puritanical attitudes toward sex that still exist.” Giardina researched the 17th century for authentic details, but emphasizes that most of the book came from her imagination. “It’s fantasy history. Chichester and Stratford I mushed together into a town I call Norchester. Even the New River I’ve fictionalized. I’ve got the Mystery Hole on the other side of the gorge I moved it.” On the serious side, characters in Fallam’s Secret challenge attitudes of prejudice and struggle against injustice, a trademark of Giardina’s fiction. “I really take on fundamentalism. The Puritans in this book stand in for modern fundamentalists. Not just Christian fundamentalism, but Islamic fundamentalism, too,” says Giardina, a multi-faceted woman who holds a divinity degree and ran unsuccessfully for governor of West Virginia in 2000. “This whole fundamentalist mindset is very scary to me. I think it’s the big challenge that we’re going to have for the next generation. It’s very powerful, it’s very irrational.” The ease with which Giardina wrote Fallam’s Secret astonished its author. After the arduous task of writing about the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Saints, “I didn’t even know if I’d ever write another novel,” she says. But in six months, she was finished. “It even took my publisher by surprise. I’m already in the middle of book two.” “I hit 50, and I started doing several things differently. I started saying I’m going to read things I want to read, not because I think I should read them. If I start a book and I don’t like it, I’m not going to finish it. I’m 50. I don’t have as much time left as I used to have,” Giardina says. “I think I’ve decided to do that with my fiction, too. I just decided if it’s not fun, I’m not going to write it.” Belinda Anderson is a West Virginia writer and teacher and the author of The Well Ain’t Dry Yet, a collection of short stories published by Mountain State Press.

Jasper Fforde takes readers on a witty, wild ride Humpty Dumpty and his nursery rhyme mob are threatening a boycott. The rabbits from Watership Down have reproduced in such numbers that only Lennie from Of Mice and Men cares to visit anymore. Everyone in Wuthering Heights has been ordered to attend rage management class. And all misspellings must be reported at once to the Cat Formerly Known as Cheshire.

Welcome to the deliriously topsy-turvy world of Jasper Fforde's The Well of Lost Plots, the most incessantly inventive literary satire since Alice what's-her-name fell down the you-know-what.

A frustrated writer who was making a living in the film industry, Fforde first made a splash in the publishing world with The Eyre Affair, a genre-stretching fantasy featuring ace "Prose Op" literary detective Thursday Next. Thursday operates in an alternate universe where authorized Prose Ops can pursue villains into BookWorld, a place where fiction comes delightfully to life, in order to prevent dastardly plot tampering with classic novels.

Thursday continued her literary enforcement in a sequel, Lost in a Good Book, but even ace detectives occasionally need a rest. In his latest novel, Fforde chose to virtually suspend the series' storyline involving Next, her time-traveling Uncle Mycroft and missing husband Landen Parke-Laine in order to get downright daffy with the inner workings of the Well of Lost Plots.

In the 26 dingy sub-basements of the Well, characters, premises and prose are polished and peddled to nascent novels. Part Moroccan thieves' market, part B-movie back lot, the Well also is where A-list heroes and villains take a break from their classic novels to vacation in unpublished works via the Character Exchange Program.

So plentiful were the satiric possibilities of this font-of-all-fiction that The Well of Lost Plots is "is a 340-page digression almost, but the idea was so strong that I really just needed to play with it," Fforde says by phone from his home in Wales. "And rather than play with it in a separate book, since I've already established that Thursday can travel into the BookWorld, let's just have a go at the whole thing."

Indeed, the presence of the Cat Formerly tips us to the unusual adventure ahead. Along the way, we encounter bat-like, text-deleting grammasites, mispeling (sic) viruses, the chatline-like footnoterphone (with running gossip about Anna Karinina), black-market plot contrivances (Still waiting for Godot? That's him in the head-in-a-bag plot device) and one particularly uncivil Minotaur on the loose.

Casting a long shadow over the future of BookWorld itself is UltraWord, a revolutionary book operating system featuring Enhanced Character Identification (you'll breeze right through War and Peace), WordClot (Bigger words? Smaller? You choose!) and PlotPotPlus (to keep you from getting lost in a good book). UltraWord: Good for business, bad for books.

"It's having a little go about modern marketing. It's about trying to get the formula right so we can sell it instead of trying to get the story right so people will buy it," says Fforde. "Bookshops didn't used to be about retailing and marketing, they just used to be about books. Now they seem to be very much about hard sell this is what is selling, this is what you should read. That's what I was sort of railing against."

The London-born Fforde spent his youth at a Harry Potter-esque boarding school in Devon, where his interests ran to Victorian classics, airplanes and movies. Rather than continue on to university, he left school at 18 and became a "focus puller," or second assistant camera operator. He spent the next 19 years traveling the world, working behind the camera on such films as Goldeneye, Entrapment and Quills.

On the road, he stayed busy conjuring a fantastic alternative England circa 1985 in which some technologies, such as cloning and time travel, are hum-drum routine while others, such as computers and jet engines, do not exist at all. Great literature, not soccer, is the national passion in his alternate U.K. Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen are virtual superstars. Thursday Next, the detective assigned to protect these national treasures, is a thoroughly modern career woman, veteran of the still-in-progress Crimean War and proud owner of a regenerated pet dodo named Pickwick.

Fforde's fondness for puns is reminiscent of the late, great Douglas Adams of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame. He has a particular soft spot for character names Paige Turner, Millon de Floss (after George Eliot's Mill on the Floss), Landen Parke-Laine (what you want to do in the British version of Monopoly) and so on. And the setting unremarkable Swindon echoes the buttoned-down world of Arthur Dent in Hitchhiker's Guide.

In each outing, Fforde selects major works from the Western literary canon around which to weave his merriment: Bronte's Jane Eyre in his debut; works by Poe (The Raven), Austen (Sense and Sensibility) and Carroll (Alice in Wonderland) in Lost in a Good Book, and Wuthering Heights in his latest. It's both an artistic and a pragmatic decision.

"People ask, why don't you use contemporary novels? For one reason, they're not in public domain. But for another reason, why? When there is so much good stuff to use in the classics," he explains. "I regard Dickens, the Bront‘s, Austen and Trollope as going back to primary sources."

The Well of Lost Plots might have been a drastically different book, in fact, but for the modern-day legal hurdles. Disney denied Fforde's request to enlist Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, and the estate of H.G. Wells wouldn't release the Morlocks from The Time Machine, either.

How in the world, then, did he manage the neat trick of bringing in Godot from Samuel Beckett's classic existential play, Waiting for Godot, much less as a head-in-a-bag plot device? Fforde laughs: "The good thing about Godot is, he doesn't actually appear in the play; they're waiting for him but he never appears! He's not actually a copyrighted character because he doesn't exist, he's not there. And now you know why: his head is in a bag in the Well of Lost Plots."

Jay MacDonald is a writer based in Mississippi.

What marks the start of the holiday season for you?

The beginning of the holiday season for me is the Christmas shopping trip I take with my best friend. We arm ourselves with lists, clear out our cars, and head for either Shreveport or Texarkana for a day of shopping. We plan our route, eat a lunch at a good place, and come home tired but happy. Then I'm officially in the holiday mood.

Does your family have one very special holiday tradition?

We have a few things we usually do, but I wouldn't characterize them as traditions. We do always have the same meal, and I do always get all the kids books even now that they're grown. We open presents on Christmas morning, and we go to church on Christmas Eve.

What are you most looking forward to during the holiday season?

I most look forward to having my whole family together. The winter my son was in the service and had to stay on post in Alaska for Christmas was so painful.

What’s your favorite holiday book or song?

I love Christmas carols, and nothing gets me in the Christmas mood faster.

Why do books make the best gifts?

Books are such a great gift because you take the time to match the book to the recipient.. That process is a lot of fun, and you're thinking about the giftee all the time.

In the decades since he was first introduced, Drizzt Do’Urden has become a fantasy archetype on par with any of Tolkien’s Middle Earth crew. But unlike Bilbo, Gandalf and company, Drizzt’s adventures are still being newly minted by creator R.A. Salvatore. Neverwinter, the followup to 2010’s Gauntlgrym, is the second of six planned books in the Neverwinter Saga, a series that races ahead 100 years in the Forgotten Realms timeline. With the last of his original companions gone, Drizzt must forge new bonds while facing determined, powerful foes at every turn. While it’s anyone’s guess what awaits Salvatore’s iconic protagonist, it’s certain where the book itself will go—straight to The New York Times bestseller list, where 23 of Salvatore’s earlier books have already been.

You’ve written more than 20 novels featuring Drizzt Do’Urden. That’s a lot of books, a lot of New York Times bestseller lists and a lot of built-in and built-up fan assumptions and desires. Do you ever find your creative direction—be it for a character or an entire story—altered by the pull of reader expectations?
It’s hard to find that balance emotionally between satisfying yourself and satisfying the fans. I’ve always erred on the side of satisfying my own creative needs; I’m letting the story tell me where to go. And let’s be honest, when Wizards of the Coast decides to fast-forward the Forgotten Realms a hundred years, that forces some changes upon me that I might not have done otherwise. That’s just the reality of working in a shared world. I’m not going to be mad about it. If I don’t like it, I can go write in somebody else’s sandbox or make my own. But as far as the fans go, their reactions do have an impact.

Can you give us an example?
I wrote a book called Road of the Patriarch, featuring Artemis Entreri and Jarlaxle—both villains.  Entreri has been a intricate part of the Drizzt series pretty much from the beginning. I wrote a short story [called “The Third Level” that recounts] his origin—as a child he was betrayed by a relative, by his mother, by a church, by everybody around him. At the end of Road of the Patriarch, Entreri has just burned down this temple in the city and he’s got a priest up on the ledge. He tells him to go, rebuild, stop lying to the people and to follow the tenets of his god, or Entreri will come back and burn the temple down again, this time with the priest in it. Right after that, he tells Jarlaxle, “Go away, I don’t need you anymore.” To me, that was Entreri for the first time in his life not hating himself. To me, that was a proper ending for Artemis Entreri.

Then the letters started coming in. Letters and emails from people sharing really personal stories of betrayals as children where they had been similarly abused, and begging me to keep going with Entreri. They had to see him healthy; they had to see him come through the other side of this epiphany he had in that book.

That sounds like a pretty heavy load to put on a fantasy writer.
It’s humbling. It’s a reminder that when you’re writing books and putting them up there for public consumption, people are letting you into their lives just a little bit as well. There’s no other way to put it—it’s humbling.

And how do you feel about fan fiction?
I won’t be beholden to it, but I love that people think enough of [my work] to go and do that. I’m not going to read it because that would get me in trouble, but if people want to do it, fine. If they try and sell is, they’re going to get sued, but that’s a whole different ball game.

What’s the latest on a Drizzt movie?
The good news is Hasbro really wants a Drizzt movie now. [Hasbro owns Wizards of the Coast, which owns the Forgotten Realms setting.] With the Transformers movies and G.I. Joe, they’ve made lots of money in movies, so they are very interested in doing it. They are raising the profile; they are contacting people. Will anything come of it? I don’t know.

One of the things working against us? They are protecting an enormously successful and stable franchise. Every year a Drizzt book comes out, we know how many we’re going to sell. A good movie would help the franchise, but a really bad one could hurt something we all love.

You’ve written more than 53 novels in the last 20 years. That’s basically the definition of “prolific.” What’s an average writing workday look like for you?
On an average day, I get about two hours at the computer. Typically, the amount of words I can do in a day is between 500 and 2,000. Once I get over 2,000, I’ve kinda drained the battery. Every now and then, I have a 5,000-word day—usually a battle scene—but I haven’t had many of those lately. I must be getting old.

In addition to your host of writing endeavors, you’ve also been working, along with Todd McFarlane and Ken Ralston, for Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios, which is releasing the open world role-playing game Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning in 2012. Your title is Executive Creator of Worlds . . .
Yes, I’m a creator of worlds—a CoW.

How does lore-building for a massive multiplayer online game compare with writing a novel?
It was very much like when I created the whole world of Corona for my DemonWars books. My job is not to design a game. We have mechanics designers—very good ones—who figure out things like class balance, the merits of fast travel versus walking or riding mounts, etc. No, my job was be the historian of the world, a world I’ve created. When a player enters the world, it has to all make sense. Why are these races where they are? Why does this particular faction hate that particular faction? Does the economy makes sense?

For the first year, all we did was world-build. I had a content team and an art team. I would meet with each team every week. At first, in the meetings with the content team, they would come in and say: “Here’s what we’re doing,” and present what they were working on. My most common response? “No. No. No.” Then I would take out the green binder that is the bible of our world, slam it down and say “How does what you’re doing relate to this? Because this is the Bible. You have to go by this.” After about three months I knew my job was almost done. Instead of “No, no, no!” I was saying, “Aw, that’s cool!” because they were getting it.

So you’re working with Todd McFarlane. You’re working with Curt Schilling. You’ve been on book tours with legends like Gaiman, Pratchett and Moorcock. Who else would you love to meet or work with?
I’d like to meet Vin Diesel because I know he’s read the books and we almost did the television series at one point, apparently. (He was interested in doing one.) I’d really like to meet him and get to know him a little bit. He’s a pretty cool guy from everything I’ve heard. I’d like to work with Ronnie Howard. If Ronnie Howard ever called me up and said, “I want to do one of your books in a movie,” I’d die on the spot because I just love his work.

How often do you have a “recognized in the street” moment?
Not often—I’m a writer. But there are moments. I was at a Renaissance Fair—King Richard’s Faire in Carver, Massachusetts, about 10-15 years ago, and who showed up but Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith. They are having a blast. They are hanging out with people and are as fun as you would think from watching their music videos. All day long, people are following Tyler and Perry around like little puppy dogs, including most of the people I had come with. At one point, I’m standing outside this vendor’s stall. I’m just standing there enjoying this great October day in New England. Tyler and Perry are standing like 10 feet away from me, and for some reason they are alone. Then this kid walks out of the stall, looks over and his eyes pop out of his head. He goes running up, right past them, to me. They both looked at me, so I just kinda crossed my arms and went, “Hah!” So yeah, there are moments.

Michael Burgin writes from Nashville. You can find the entire transcript of his talk with R.A. Salvatore here.