Neil Gaiman's 'Sandman' just rocked my world in the late '80s and early '90s. I couldn't read them fast enough.

You have an audience that is fairly well grounded in the real world. You serve them and yourself best by making everything as real as possible.

Didn't they realize that the only way to change things was to act?

The fantasy that appeals most to people is the kind that's rooted thoroughly in somebody looking around a corner and thinking, 'What if I wandered into this writer's people here?' If you've done your job and made your people and your settings well enough, that adds an extra dimension that you can't buy.

Publishers have realized that, unlike the previous time period, American teenagers are both smarter and require more topical material than they had been giving them before that. For one thing, they'll read thicker books. Besides, has anybody looked at the news or read the newspapers recently?

I believe that we haven't begun to understand the many forces that bind the physical world, any more than we understand our own minds and what they're capable of.