I was born in East Meadow, New York on March 20, 1954 and lived there until third grade. My dad worked on the 78th floor of the Empire State Developing, and maybe that somehow inspired Wayside School, who knows? When I was nine years old, we moved to Tustin California. At that time, there had been orange groves all around, and the neighborhood youngsters would normally divide up into teams and have orange fights. The "ammo" hung from the trees, while the preferred ones had been the gushy, rotten ones on the ground. Now most of the orange trees are gone, replaced with rapidly food restaurants, and big box shops. I enjoyed school and was a superb student, but it wasn't until high school that I genuinely became an avid reader. J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut were the authors who 1st inspired me. Some of my other favorite authors consist of E.L. Doctorow, Margaret Atwood, E.B White, Richard Cost and Kazuo Ishiguro. Following high school, I attended Antioch College in Ohio. My father died in the course of my initial semester, and I returned to California to be near my mother. Throughout that time, I had a brief but surprisingly profitable career as a Fuller Brush man. For those of you too young to know what that is, I went door-to-door selling cleaning items. My websites: Are You Addicted to Hydrocodone?