It was the early eighties and I was grappling with my first middle grade novel, a pitiful imitation of Daniel Pinkwater’s
Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars. The boy in my aptly-titled “The Doomsday Kid” played
Dungeons and Dragons and attended a rock concert that ended in a bottle-and-can riot. For “research,” I tried to teach myself D
&D and dragged my husband to a Bad Company concert that ended in his temporary deafness.…
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