I love being asked off-the-wall or unusual questions from people who have read my book. It makes me think creatively, or at least cock my head and blink several times. The one I was asked the most recently came from a professor – to be specific, an Apple-loving professor from India who teaches in my department. In the midst of a conversation with him about computer systems last week, he suddenly looked at me in horror and said, “You didn’t write your novel on a Windows machine, did you? No self-respecting novelist would use a Windows machine.”

Got to admit, that one took me off guard.

A question that I’ve been asked more frequently, however, has to do with where I wrote my book rather than what type of computer I used. As it turns out, The Quest of the Unaligned was written in quite a lot of places. Here are all the ones I can remember:

–In Pasadena, California (my hometown).

Sublocations:

• At home on my laptop,

• Scribbled on the back of church bulletins in between services
• Outside on the patio
• Inside on the big-screen desktop computer when I wanted multiple windows open at once

• In the car (while I was a passenger, don’t worry!)

–In Grove City, Pennsylvania (my undergraduate school)

Sublocations:

• In my dorm-room.
• In a friend’s dorm-room.
• In the antique study hall.
• In the English Suite.
• In the Sociology Suite.
• In the library.
• In the hallway in between classes.
• In class for the five minutes before class actually started.
• Outside on the lawn.
• In fact, pretty much everywhere.

–In Lincoln, Nebraska (my current school)

Sublocations:

• In my apartment.
• In my office.
• In a hotel room on my first visit to the city. (I actually remember this one quite clearly: I wrote the scene where Alaric and Naruahn leave Lord Deshamai’s lands while sitting cross-legged on a hotel bed. I really didn’t want to stop writing and go to sleep, even though I had my grad-school interview early the next morning.)

–In airplanes. Lots of airplanes.

–And airports. I get so much writing done in airports – especially when they don’t have free Internet!

So yes. The United States is quite well geographically represented in the creation of The Quest of the Unaligned – on the ground, as well as above it. But yes, it is also true that I didn’t write a word of it on a Mac. If that fact makes you think less of the book, you’re entitled to that opinion. I, however, will continue to consider myself a self-respecting novelist, and keep typing away at my Windows machine wherever I happen to be, from coast to coast.