Time Swimmer is just out with Macmillan Caribbean. You can see it posted at 'gerald's bookstore' on this very site. A student asked me yesterday -- "What book has the most of YOU in it?" We forget sometimes that kids like to know their author as much as they want to read their author's novel. How do you know an author, if you don't know one? I remember when I was twelve. I used to stand at the mailbox of an author who lived in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey where we were living, and I just stared at his name. The author had written a book about man-eating tigers. And I stood there in front of his mailbox inhaling his name, as if that, all by itself, would make me a writer.

Some years later, on Lake Buel in Massachusetts, I overheard two fishermen talking on the lake one misty morning. The conversation went something like this --

--What'd'ya say your name was?

--Frank Jacobs

--Mine's Harney Wilcox.

--Nice t'meet'ya.

--Same.

--What'd'ya do for a living, Frank?

--I am a writer for Mad Magazine.

At that point I almost fell into the lake. Was this really Frank Jacobs, the man whose words we roared over? Why was he in a boat? The man could walk on water!

I stayed around until Frank docked his boat and then I rushed over to meet him. He turned pale when he saw how nuts I was to meet him. "You really know my name?" he asked putting away his lures. Enraptured, I nodded. I'd lost the ability to speak.

Now I go into schools and read from my books and sometimes I get a response not unlike the one I gave Frank fifty-two years ago, in 1957.

So -- when the student said -- "What book has the most of YOU in it?" I told him Time Swimmer, which is just, just, just out.

"What's it about?" he asked.

"Well," I said, "the story's full of spiders that are men and lizards that are gods all mixed together in a pepperpot stew of fantastic spice that is history and fantasy together -- it's a book about things that never happened amidst things that did. For instance, there's a scene with Nazis in U-boats prowling the harbor of St Lucia in the West Indies. There's the story of the only man who survived the Mount Pelee volcanic eruption of 1902; that was the volcano that killed some 28,000 people in a few minutes, and . . ."

"And that's all about YOU?" the student asked, in wonder.

I answered, "It's about ME, the storyteller. I let myself go in this book. I let myself go completely and told everything I knew about living in the Caribbean. Everything I'd ever absorbed, thought about, heard about, walked into, fell into, dropped off of, just everything!"

After I said that, I was pretty much done and headed over to the table where all my books were displayed and every copy of Time Swimmer was sold.

"They want to know all about YOU," a teacher told me with a wry smile.

Time Swimmer is my favorite book. Of course it's my most recent and it hasn't given me any grief. Sometimes books do. Give grief. One time, when I was starting out, a novel I wrote was given to a woman dying in a hospital in Billings, Montana. The woman died reading my book and her son wrote me a mean letter telling me that my book was DEADLY.

Well, Time Swimmer is a novel that is hard to put down -- so the kids tell me. But it's not deadly. It tells of some deadly events in human history, but it won't kill you to hear them. Once, anyway.

A boy at a school in West Palm Beach asked me last week, "What is the worst thing that can happen to an author?"

I said, "His reader can stop turning pages."

"How do you know," he questioned, "if this reader of yours has quit...do you have a hidden camera coded into every page?"

I laughed. "Yes," I said, "That's how I know. And are you going to be a writer?"

"I might."

That's good enough for me.