Please welcome D. R. Evans, author of Palindor. D.R. will be chatting on LibraryThing until August 14th.

Thanks to LT for allowing me to participate in this author chat.

I'll write just a bit of background about me, so you have a bit of an idea about who I am. I lived in England (mostly in Cornwall) until I was 23, when I got married and almost immediately moved to Colorado, where my wife and I still live. I was trained as a physicist (educated at Oxford and Wales), and for 15 years worked as an investigator on the Voyager mission to the outer planets. I worked on the Planetary Radio Astronomy experiment, which amongst other things was responsible for determining the rotation rates of the outer planets.

Since the mid 90s I have worked as a consultant and an employee in high tech, mostly in the field of computer networking. I participated in authoring several widely used standards, particularly C++, PacketCable and DOCSIS. I sort-of retired at the end of 2007, although I spent most of 2008 working as an expert witness in a big telecommunications intellectual-property lawsuit.

My first book to be published was Palindor, in 1993 (I think). Currently I have eight fiction works and one non-fiction work Digital Telephony over Cable available. I am currently working on the final galleys for my next novel.

Thanks for joining us here at LibraryThing, Mr. Evans. I read Palindor several years ago, and enjoyed it very much. Can you tell us a bit about your new novel?

The new novel (which, if I get over the flu in time, should be out this month), is "something completely different".

I wanted to write something that would be a real challenge for a science-minded male author, so it's in the form of extracts from the personal journal of a woman poet from the age of about 12 to her death in her mid thirties. It will be classified as "Literature" rather than any kind of genre fiction. Unlike everything I've done before, it's not designed to be an easy read, so I'm not sure what kind of reception it will receive (probably it will disappear without a trace :-) ). Its title is "The Writings of Penny Smith Logan".

The hardest part was writing the poems, since I'm not very much of a poetry enthusiast, but I could hardly have a book like this without any poems. It was also a challenge to change the style of writing, first becoming more complex and sophisticated as Penny ages through her teen years and then studies English Literature at university, and then becoming simpler as she leaves academic life for the real world.

This book was a lot of hard work after spending much of the last year producing new editions of the three Palindor books. I think I'll stick to genre fiction for a while now -- it's much easier.

Sounds ambitious and interesting...Thanks.