Choose Your Agent As Carefully

I Much Prefer Working With Kids Whose Life Could Be Completely Upended By A Reading Of A Book Over A Weekend. You Give Them A Book To Read - They Go Home And Come Back A Changed Person. And That Is So Much More Interesting And Exciting.

And There Are People Who Want To Be Writers Because They Love To Write. And They Care.

It Was Strange To Stand There In Front Of The Mirror And See Myself Like I Was My Own Best Friend, A Kid Wanted To Hang With Forever. This Was A Boy I Could Travel To The Seacoasts With, A Boy I'd Like To Meet Up With In Foreign Cities Like Calcutta And London And Brazil, A Boy I Could Trust Who Also Had A Good Sense Of Humor And Liked Smoked Oysters From A Can And Good Weed And The Occasional 40 Ounces Of Malt. If I Was Going To Be Alone For The Rest Of My Life This Was The Person I Wanted To Be Alone With.

My Major Allegiance Has Been To Storytelling, Not To History.

The 60s Passed And Faded And I Grew Older, And In 1987 Bought A House In Upstate New York, And It Turned Out That John Brown Was Buried Down The Road From My House And That He Had Lived There Longer Than Anywhere Else And His House Was Still Standing.