I remember one winter, when I was about five or six, I spent three days with another boy, tracking a bobcat that had been sighted in another county fifty miles away, but which I was sure had come into our neighborhood.
I didn't want readers to have to make allowances for what they couldn't see, but to be able to say to themselves that the fabric of the magic detailed was perfectly believable.
Anyway, several rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list.
Growing up, I didn't have a lot of toys, and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination - think up a story and go live it for an afternoon.
