Michael: “Hi everyone, Michael Palmer here again with Q&A. I’m really enjoying this, I’ve gotten a lot of questions and I’ll go through several of the newest batch now and I hope who doesn’t have his or her question answered won’t be too upset– I’m doing the best I can. Let’s start with Ross.”

Ross: “I know that you wrote the book “Fatal” from personal experience, so in light of this, is this the only book you have written that you drew from personal experience?”

Michael: “The answer is all of my books are drawn from personal experience in one way or another. The book Fatal (which was about vaccinations and my position that vaccines are not tested to the same standard as other drugs) was written due to a lot of research that I did around Asperger Syndrome and around my child who has Asperger Syndrome. But there are pieces of every book I write about that come from someone else’s or my own experience.”

Nicoleta: “How do you find the perfect subject for the books you write? How long did you spend writing “The First Patient?”

Michael: “The answer is finding out what to write about is the hardest thing for me. I don’t have a batch of ideas sitting in the cupboard like some authors I know. So the hardest part is sitting here at the beginning trying to figure out what to write about. Fortunately, I try out my ideas on my agent and also my editor, and when we hit on something that seems good I start to move forward with developing the idea into a “what-if” question.”

Emma: “Out of all the books you have written, which was your favorite to write and why?”

Michael: “All authors who have done more than one get that question frequently and we all answer that it’s a little like deciding which one of our children is our favorite. But the truth is, I do have some favorites. I love the book “The Patient”– the heroine Jessie is one of my favorite characters to have written about. I really enjoyed writing “The Second Opinion” which deals with Asperger Syndrome, and my new book “The Last Surgeon” is possibly the most fun of all to have written about and I’m really excited to start getting some feedback from people which will begin to happen now that the review copies have gone out. So those are my favorites– but I like the other ones too, don’t get me wrong.”

Mary: “For your book the “Second Opinion”, did you know anyone specifically with Asperger Syndrome? how much research did you have to do for this topic?”

Michael: “Well, I sort of answered that. One of my son has it and has done very well with it. ‘How much research did you have to do?’– not so much, I’ve been doing it since he was four years old. And finally, the same thing, my son has it and he’s twenty-one now and manages it quite well. He’s also very intelligent– and well all know that kids with this problem are intelligent and they need work on their social pragmatics more than their academics. Fortunately if you look at the dedication in ‘The Second Opinion’ the book is dedicated to the school my kid went to that made an incredible difference in his life. But there are other schools– it’s just a matter of work, work, work.”

John: “Is it easier to just write a story around set characters or to write a story with new characters every book?”

Michael: “Excellent question. We call that “stand-alones”– there is no continuity from one novel that we write to another. I’ve never written anything other than stand-alones and there’s a reason for that: it’s that each of my characters in each of my books– the main characters have issues that feed into the fact that all they want to do is be happy. The issues are deadly ones– they’re difficult ones– and for me to put the same character in a difficult, deadly situation twice would be too much of coincidence. I keep searching for a recurring character but so far I haven’t run into it. And I think it would be just as tough to write that as it would be to write a standalone.”