Sometimes, when I'm speaking at a school or conference and someone has to introduce me, that person feels obligated to try to find something interesting to say about me. "Do you have any hobbies?" she asks.

"Um, I like to ride my bicycle," I say.

"Have you ever lived in exotic places?" she asks.

"Would Burnsville, Minnesota count for you?"

"Do you know any famous people?" (Now she's really desperate.)

"Once, when I was in college, I served Jane Russell a piece of pie."

"Who?"

Some authors lead fascinating lives. I do not. Well, it's interesting enough to me, but mostly it's very ordinary.

Another story:

When I was a novice copywriter in an advertising agency, my boss hired a high school intern. She was supposed to watch me and learn how I did my job. I suggested that it might be more fun if she tried writing something herself, but she declined. She preferred to watch, she said.

Well, I told her about my assignments, and then she watched. Frankly, there wasn't much to see. Me, with my fingers poised over the keys of my typewriter. Me, staring off into space. Me, picking lint off my sweater. On widely-spaced occasions, me, pecking away at the keys.

My poor intern was so bored, she almost fell off her chair. In the end she decided she didn't want to be a writer after all and went off to intern with the account manager.

But I wasn't bored! There was all kinds of stuff going on in my imagination.

Do you see what I'm saying? My life is plenty interesting to me, but for anyone else it's about as enthralling as watching leaf mold decompose.

Now my characters...they do interesting things! They baby-sit for dragons. They sneak out of palaces in rolled-up carpets. They brave the raging surf to rescue their friends. They nearly die in sandstorms on caravan journeys in the desert. They hide draclings in laundry baskets and smuggle them out of inns-right under the noses of the soldiers who are looking to capture them.

I don't mean to say that writers shouldn't lead interesting lives. And I don't mean to say that my life has always been as settled and boring as it is now. All of our life experiences are fuel for our writings.

And it's true that even nowadays I occasionally do something unusual or interesting. I have to, so I can find out what I need in order to write my books. To that end, I've ridden in a glider, on a camel, on a donkey, and in the locomotive of a train. I've poked around in a lava tube, in a sea cave, and in a cavern with stalactites and stalagmites. I've chopped up food for falcons, been slimed by a slug, and traveled across the desert in Iran. You can see pictures of some of these things on the "Adventures" section of this site.

But to me, the most interesting part of my life (besides my family and friends) is what's happening in my imagination. If you want to find out more about this, you could read my books and the "Books" part of this website.

When I was a kid, I liked to explore alone in the woods behind our house. I did this for hours. Really. Hours and hours, all alone. Things were safer back then, and my mom didn't worry about me at all. Usually I didn't do anything exciting, just sort of wandered around and looked at stuff and daydreamed.

These days, I love to get up early in the morning--before the cat starts whining to be fed; before the phone begins to ring; before the cars, busses, leaf blowers, radios, airplanes, and garbage trucks begin to grind out noise. I don't check email, not yet. I turn on my old laptop, wrap myself in a blanket, and listen to the rain tapping on the skylight. (This is Oregon. There's almost always rain.) In a while, if I'm lucky, words and pictures form in my mind. It's as if my imagination needs room to breathe.

I've heard there is an old Chinese curse that goes like this: "May you live in interesting times." The reason it's a curse is that it's truly not such a bad thing to have a boring life. Boring on the outside, that is. For writers-and readers, too--there's always something interesting going on inside.