I like to think that proto-humans learned the value of story-telling shortly after they learned the value of language. Story-telling feeds the minds...the imaginative side, the magical side, the creative side, the logical side...and not listening to stories is like denying your humanity. Yes, today we have many ways to 'tell' a story. Video, film, language, images...all art is really a form of story-telling, just as is science. We are telling our human story, and this is why I write what I write. I want my readers/listeners/viewers to be compelled to enter another world, another life...to read is to live a thousand lives and who wouldn't like to be a hard-boiled Private I, or a diminutive medicine man with a barbarian warrior companion roaming the wild lands of Kan Alla? While I enjoy what has come to be called 'literary' fiction, the New York-dominated marketing-machine that has become commercial publishing has decided that these are to be either semi-autobiographical novels presented as biography, or long, talky meditations on the internal monologues of seriously neurotic, upper-middle class suburbanites. I grew up on TREASURE ISLAND, KIDNAPPED, ROBIN HOOD (the original novel, if you please) and other such 'children's' literature. BLACK BEAUTY or LASSIE, or ROB ROY and TOM SAWYER/HUCKLEBERRY FINN allowed me to live lives I could never have imagined for myself. From the African griot to Homer, from Shakespeare to Burrows, it is about the story, my friends. However you choose to experience it. I prefer sitting around a campfire, lubricating the gathering with suitable comestibles and taking turns telling the tales of our lives...and the lives we might have lead.

Not a damn thing. Thanks a lot, you guys.