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I'm in the middle of reading the page proofs for the UK Puffin edition of Nim's Island. When I came to the description of Nim lighting a fire:

"She unscrewed the lens from her spyglass. She pointed it so that the sun shone a bright beam on her kindling. A brown patch grew and glowed - and a small flame sparkled on the dry palm fronds..."

I suddenly remembered that I'd written that after visiting a friend who'd just had a fire in her living room. Her reading glasses had been lying on the newspaper on the coffee table - in just the right way that the sun hit them and heated up the newspaper till it burst into flames.

Would I have thought of Nim making fire this way if my friend hadn't told me of her scare? Maybe; maybe not. That's why I love writing - because I never know what I'm going to discover till it happens.

Right now (at least once I've finished reading these proofs) I need to discover whether the pony tail I saw the other day will find a place in the current work in progress. I think it belongs there - but I won't know for sure till I write it.

Sci Fi Weekly features an interview with author Ray Bradbury. Bradbury is the author of 35 books and numerous short stories, including Fahrenheit 451. At the age of 86, he is about to release his next book Match to Flame: The Fictional Paths to Fahrenheit 451.

...Match to Flame, will be all about my unconsciously leading the way to Fahrenheit 451, which I wrote in the autumn of 1950. I wrote it in nine days at the library of UCLA. Down in the basement, I found a typing room where I could rent a typewriter for 10 cents a half-hour. I moved in with a bag of dimes and I spent $9.80, and nine days later I finished Fahrenheit 451 in its first version, which is 25,000 words....Two years later, Ballantine Books came to me and said, "We love your story The Firemen [the original title]. If you find a new title for it and add words to it, we'll publish it." So I sat down, wrote an additional 25,000 words and changed the title from The Firemen to Fahrenheit 451.