Goodreads asked James Van Pelt:

What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?

James Van Pelt My dad was a mystery to me, or at least a complicated figure. He was a bit OCD, I think. He had strict rules about how his tools should be arranged, and he was a list-keeper: how and when the mattresses where flipped, number of putts on a round of golf, gas and mileage on the car at each fillup, etc. He also was logical and mathematical, but he had odd obsessions: like the location of Noah's Ark, Immanuel Velikovsky's theories about Venus, the existence of UFOs. He told me that when he was a young aeronautical engineer working for Goodyear in New Mexico in the 50s that he and some other engineers were drinking one night and decided to visit the site of the first nuclear test. They wanted to collect some a-bomb glass (heat-fused sand at ground zero), so they piled into a jeep and drove into the desert. Fortunately, Dad said, they were too drunk to climb the fence. I think a guy like that might be worthy of a novel.

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