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When I read Thirteen Days I was moved by it. It was just a great time for the world, in terms of looking back in history and seeing how we got ourselves into trouble and how we got ourselves out of trouble.

I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.

What I try to do for my readers is to pass on some of the things that I found out about being thirteen after doing it for forty years.

I just finished my 11th book last week, so I'm ready to start the next one.

I wrote the book in my head when I was 6 years old.

The age of the book is almost gone.

Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.

When I was twelve, Uncle Randall looked up long enough to see that I was a reader as well, so he walked me down his hall to a linen-closet door and opened it up onto a wall of paperbacks. There were books behind books, as deep in as I could reach. He told me to take three, and when I was done, bring them back and take three more.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.