. . . Wait. There's a fan reading this? A real, live FAN?! . . . Excuse me a moment . . . Hyperventilating here . . .

Steady on . . .

Thank you so much for reading my book and for liking my book. Thanks for liking it well enough to spend money on my book that you could spend on other fun things, like lattes, or songs on iTunes, or beer. I promise never to forget that you are the most important person in this relationship, because an author without a reader is . . . not an author at all, but just a sad little guppy who thinks she's a shark.

Thanks for making me an author.

It's a stand-up computer desk I got from Ikea a few years back. It's six feet tall and looks like a set of bookshelves with one shelf (the desktop) on steroids.

On the top is a bookshelf on which I keep my collection of minor league sports plush mascot toys (mostly from hockey teams, but a few baseball team mascots have snuck in. Party crashers.) Below that are three cantilevered shelves which hold my monitor, my Macbook Air in clamshell mode, and my office supplies. The side uprights support wire baskets holding cd-ROMs of music and old software, along with packing supplies for the . . . er, good used electronics I sometimes sell on eBay.

The desk surface itself is at elbow height and holds the usual keyboard, along with the graphics tablet I use instead of a mouse. There are also various cables snaking back and forth, an unused journal or two, some first aid supplies, and an incense burner that looks like a teepee. A fancy four-bin Post-it holder has illegible scrawls on all four pads.

There's also a bookshelf underneath the desktop which holds art supplies, old filmmaking textbooks, and my computer speaker system.

Old favorites and current obsessions include:

• Isaac Asimov
• Robert A. Heinlein
• Cordwainer Smith
• Terry Pratchett
• Mercedes Lackey
• JRR Tolkien
• Jim Butcher

Good heavens, no. The exact story, no. But reading—reading is among the first things I remember doing. I had a stack of Little Golden Books which I read and re-read constantly. My Mom read to me before I can remember, and from that I picked reading up and took off on my own through the literary wilderness. She was appalled at the monster she'd created. Mom, bless her heart, thought I should be out playing in the sun or something, you know, socializing with the other three-year-olds, but good grief! Those kids didn't know about the Poky Little Puppy, or the Little Red Hen, or anything!

On the other hand, if she wanted me to do something she only had to promise me a book...

My iPad is my first choice. I have it loaded up with four ebook reader apps, so that even if the book I want is exclusive to one retailer, I can always get my fix...