I haven’t yet read Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road — I read very little fiction when I’m writing — but I’m already delighted by that flat-out subtitle: “A Tale of Adventure.” I’ve recently written elsewhere about the freedom genre can offer a writer, whether it’s young people’s fiction (which I also write) or the non-contemporary setting and milieu I used in Under the Poppy.

My own gentlemen of the road, Rupert and Istvan, have given me a fantastic adventure, a real swim in the sea of the unconscious, to a degree I hadn’t enjoyed for ages. Tropes rose up from the mist and murk, curtains parted, lights flickered in the theater of the mind. . . And best of all, nothing, nothing, nothing was off-limits. Nothing was too dark or too outre to be handled, used, and enjoyed: all the doors were open, and the puppets came out to play.

Writing is, at heart, an act of communication, and I do consider eventual readers when I work: how dismal, to write only for oneself. But the act of writing is a solitary pleasure (or, god knows, a solitary pain), and I truly enjoyed my theatrical romp — an enjoyment that I hope translates to the page and on to the reader, reading for pleasure, a tale of adventure.