Time Travel and Goats

Downtown Phoenixville and its legendary Colonial movie theater.

I drove to Phoenixville, PA the same day they were racing goats just three miles outside of town. This is not a joke; the goat race is serious business 'round these parts. Every year Sly Fox brews up a new batch of bock beer and names it after the winning goat. One year, they tell me, a three-legged goat won. Another year, a young girl gently guided her animal to victory... as burly bikers struggled to drag their beasts across the finish line. But I wasn't here for the goats. Jason Hafer, a Phoenixville-based writer who leads a local crime fiction reading group, invited me up to talk about my novel Expiration Date. I'd met Jason and his fellow group members this past January at the Goodis Bus Tour. The tour was clearly a hit, because the group was already looking forward to next year's trek. (Lou, we need to start planning soon.) It was incredibly flattering to have a table full of lively, smart people ask questions about the novel. Some asked about the time travel elements, which I admitted, was based on some very wonky faux-science. (But it all makes sense in my head!) Others wondered how much of the novel autobiographical. I told them that there was a lot of the real me in the book: the actual address of my childhood home, the neighborhood stores I'd visit, certain family details. "This is my life, if it had gone in a very different direction," I said. And that was the peculiar fun of writing Expiration Date: blending real life with heaps of sci-fi and murder and what-ifs, both fantastical and mundane. I loved talking about the book, even when one of the group members (looking at you, Norris) pointed out a few of my continuity flubs. But hell, my real life is full of continuity errors. Why should the novel be any different?