I always intended a career in the sciences. One day I was visiting a friend in San Francisco, when I decided to drop in on a game store that I was fond of. Upon exiting the store I met a fellow named Gary Gygax, who stopped me on the way out and began to describe a game he had just created entitled Dungeons and Dragons. It sounded interesting, so I reentered the store and purchased what later became known as the ‘boxed set’, three pamphlets that laid out the foundation for the creation of a fantasy game world. I went home and immediately set about designing my own world. Soon friends from college were meeting at my house every Friday night for fantasy adventure. My first wife, deceased now over forty years, never had an interest in the game, but she used to lie in bed at night and listen to the stories I weaved for my friends in the adjoining room. It was not long before she started insisting that I needed to write. I was a writer, she said. I was a scientist, I responded. She was persistent, and eventually I began to write short stories as an experiment. Something fascinating happened.