David Lubar

Assuming you are reading this before March of 2010, I'm 55. Otherwise, I'm older. I was born and raised in Morristown, NJ. It was a great place to grow up. I could walk into town, and also walk to some really nice parks. My mother was a school librarian, so I spent lots of time in the library when I was a kid (mostly because my teachers kept kicking me out of class for talking too much). Beside the school there was a town library and a county library. They were all great places to find books.

I've lived in New Brunswick, Edison and Piscataway, NJ, and Sacramento, CA. For the last 18 years, I've lived in Pennsylvania, but I've stayed close enough to the NJ border than I can sneak across any time I want for a pizza, a hard roll, or any of the other great food I grew up with. I've been married for 32 years. I have a daughter, Alison, who's 23, and three cats (Simon, Layla, and Tybalt). I had a goldfish who lived for nearly seven years and grew to monstrous proportions.

After going to college at Rutgers, where I got a degree in Philosophy (and played guitar in a bluegrass band), I tried writing for a living. I collected about 100 rejections before I sold anything. The first year I earned any money, I made a whopping $8. I made a bit more the next year, but it still wasn't enough to live on unless I wanted to survive on tree bark and rainwater, so I looked for a job. I worked as an editor for Creative Computing Magazine, starting in 1980. Two years later, I was offered a job designing and programming video games for a company in California. I got to meet (and even work with) a lot of the pioneers of home computing and video games.

I spent many years designing and programming games for various companies. In 1994, I decided I really wanted to get back to writing. I spent all my spare time writing and reading. I started selling more stories, and I worked on a couple of books. In 1995, I had the fabulous luck to sell six books.

My writing got sidetracked again for a while during 1998 and 1999, when I did a whole bunch of video game work. But, believe it or not, I'd rather write books than games. I especially like to write stories that are scary, strange, or funny. I also write humor articles for magazines. And I just started writing a humor column for VOYA, a magazine about YA books. Someday, I'd like to write a movie or a cartoon show. The most important thing I can say about writing is that I really enjoy it. I get to create whole worlds, and those worlds can be as weird or strange or magical as I want.

I've had a chance to speak at tons of writing and reading conferences. That's a lot of fun. I've traveled to places like Nashville, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Hershey. But, to tell the truth, I'm just as happy to stay home where I can play with my cats and write books.