After writing ten non-fiction titles on hilarious subjects such as light-physics, lighting design, fiber optics and bridge (not the one you hurl yourself from but the one you play with thirteen cards), I decided to write fiction. Without stopping to investigate if fiction was any different from writing about Plank’s black body, I wrote a half-million-word novel. Naturally in Spanish, like the rest of my previous work.
My publisher sent the thing to Carmen Balcells, the then dean of Spanish literary a more...