...is that if you're writing fiction in the hopes of making money, you're in the wrong business. I write because I love creating characters and having them tell their stories to me. So the remark about making my living made me chuckle. And as for making autistic people look bad, in all my writing, I try to make characters as real as possible. How do I know if they are real? They start to talk and act "on their own". In other words, the story surprises me. It may not go where I thought it would go. It doesn't make any difference if a character is autistic, anymore than if she's a redhead. My basic assumption is that people are all pretty much alike in their capacity for emotion. The reason we care about characters in fiction, and each other in reality, is our sense that we are all alike on a basic level.

As for winning the lottery, and randomness.... I majored in physics in university. I have been fascinated by randomness since I came across a table of random numbers in the CRC Math Handbook. I could go on and on about randomness. But the basic fact is this: a random sequence of numbers has no discernable pattern. The key word is discernable.

How that figures into the story... well, just wait and see!

By the way, I live in a household with a seven year old boy diagnosed with Asperger's. I love him a lot. I'm sitting talking with his mom about his educational program right now.

Meanwhile, I am here doing research on how autistic people deal with emotion and emotional communication.