David Spitzley

February 22, 2002

First, I want to start by thanking you for writing your books. I first came across Fat Men from Outer Space in 3rd grade in the early 1980s, and proceeded to read every one of your books that I could find. Alan Mendelsohn gave me a model for finding a way to be happy as a weirdo, and by high school I’d pretty much succeeded. While I’ve arguably gotten more boring as my childhood has progressed (I’m 30 but still like the Teletubbies), I still look forward to seeing more novels by you hit the shelves, and plan on communicating the mysteries of the faith to my niece and nephews as soon as they hit the “why?” phase.

Ok, let me get out of grovelling position before I go on; it’s tough on my knees…

Ah, much better. Anyway, cognizant of the fact that you’ve commented on prefering letters from kids because they ask questions, I’ve got one I’ve been thinking about for a couple of years: have you ever considered allowing or even encouraging an adaptation of your works for use as a roleplaying game setting?

I think that the combination of adventure, wonder and humor in your books would be wonderful material for roleplaying campaigns. While individuals have been adapting material from novels and films since roleplaying began, a company called Steve Jackson Games (www.sjgames.com) has produced extraordinary adaptations of the Diskworld and Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon settings for their GURPS system, and whenever I’ve mentioned the idea of GURPS Hoboken (my nickname for the notional sourcebook) on the company’s newsgroups, there’s clearly a lot of interest. From what the SJ Games writers’ guidelines indicate, they don’t generally accept proposals for adaptations if they don’t have a license, but if as the author you would be interested in seeing such a book produced, I imagine they’d be interested in talking to you.

Well, I know that I’ve just committed a major act of presumption, but I’d rather ask and have you say no than fail to bring up an idea that might have a chance of coming to fruition. If you want more information, let me know.

Actually, I have one more question: who is your favorite author? and do you read any magazines or other periodicals regularly? (ok, two questions…)

I think I'm probably not interested in game adaptations at this time. Is there a ton of money in it? Would I be given some? How much? Nah. Not enough. Not interested.