I met my first real live, honest-to-goodness science fiction writer when I was twelve. It was a sobering experience. Several illusions dissipated in a cloud of reality and it has contoured my thinking about writers in general ever since—unjustly, since the illusions banished had really little to do with writing.
Children tend to take things at face value, approaching life with a literalness that is too often confused with naivete. Perhaps this is due to the way in which a child’s expectations—often of the most sophisticated construction, like fiction—collide so painfully with reality.
Whatever the cause, I went to Carpenter Branch Public Library with a head full of expectations, most of which were based with tortuous logic on the artifacts singularly important to me up to that point—television and books. …