This is a picture of my father and I on Easter Sunday, about twenty years ago. By the time I was ten, the old bastard dropped off the face of the earth, and when I saw him again, he was in a hospital bed and I missed saying goodbye to him by less than three hours. The only contact we had for that 15-year stretch of time was in 2001, when I got wicked drunk and tracked down his phone number; I was in Korea at the time. His departure from my young life set the stage for a couple of other people to move in, without whom there’s no way in Hell I’d ever have become interested enough in books to become a genre writer.

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