Because I'm a sucker for a good meme:

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."

2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.

3. You will update your livejournal/website with the answers to the questions and leave the answers as comments here (or at least provide a pointer to your site).

4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.

5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.


My questions, via Jeremy Tolbert:


1. I take it from your journal that you're a writer. What kinds of things fascinate you enough to write about them?

Anything shiny, like pennies.

I mostly write science fiction (still aspiring, alas). What fascinates me enough to write a story are usually the things I wish existed. I think, "Why haven't they invented X yet?" Then I write a story about X, to help me see what it might be like.


2. Where are you from, and how do you think where you grew up influences the person you are?

I'm from upstate New York, the town Niskayuna. It's a suburb of Schenectady, of GE fame (but decreasingly so), near Albany. By the time I was growing up there in the '80s and '90s, Schenectady wasn't exactly Metropolis.

Harlan Ellison has a line that, when people ask him where he gets his ideas, he says, "Schenectady." Specifically, a post office box in Schenectady, where you mail them a couple bucks and they mail you back an idea. (I've also seen this attributed to Ben Bova.)

Clearly this is why I decided to write science fiction.


3. What was the comic book that led you to become a vegetarian?

Animal Man, issues 1-26, the original Grant Morrison run from 1988 to 1990. I became a vegetarian right around when Morrison left the book. It was something I'd been considering for a while, out of vague ethical stirrings. I decided that if I didn't need to eat meat, I felt better about myself not doing so. That's what reading about an animal-loving superhero will do to you, at such an impressionable age.


4. What do you do for a living?

I'm an editor. I mostly make tables for statistical reference books, with data gathered from various government websites. We take data that's only available online, and we publish it for libraries and other people who still want it in print. I also do some copyediting and making figures. My job isn't flashy or glamorous--think of Chandler's job from Friends, before he went into advertising--but I enjoy it.

I like being in publishing, like helping make a book that I can hold and eye on the shelf. These aren't books you cuddle up with over a latte, but they're books, and I like making them.


5. Name three books that should have never been written.

For very different reasons:

A Slipping-Down Life, by Anne Taylor. We had to read this in tenth grade, and it was the worst book I've ever been subjected to.

Most of the Xanth novels, by Piers Anthony. The first three were great, and so were a few of the later ones. But most of them were crap, and they tainted the other books in the series (like West Wing after Sorkin left).

Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler. I haven't read it, and I don't mean to sound glib by listing it alongside bad novels. But I'm sure the world would be better off if this hadn't been written.