I read at UC Riverside's Writers Week and was introduced by Susan Straight, the great novelist of the Inland Empire. There were about fifty people in the theater and after reading one a passage that I've read before, I said, "Y'know, it's easy for a writer to select the juicy bits, but why not throw it to you - let's see how this stands up if I read random pages numbers chosen by you." It's a strong way to test a book and it forces me to evaluate a section that I may not have thought about since the final copy edit.

We talked about how the news these days isn't just horrifying, it's also entertaining. How does a writer compete with that?

One young lad had the answer, "Write something that's more entertaining than the news."