Well, now—there was my separate study, in that two-story wing, with a covered walkway to the main house. We liked the symmetry of it, but my wife had other notions for the main house. So we merged notions, and pulled in the wings, and finally perfected a two-story house with garage and storage room on one side and my study complex on the other, and everything she wanted in the center. At last count it was somewhere over 4000 square feet.

Actually, after she designed it we saw an article in Popular Science about dome houses made of special insulated cement blocks. The notion intrigued us, and we worked out a dome-house complex that did all the same things: a main dome for the house, an attached study dome, a garage dome, a daughters-bedroom dome, a pool dome, I forget what. But when we talked to the contractor, he said, "What about resale value?" We did a double-take and pulled out the old plans. A house is not just a place to live, it's an investment. Ours, to be built on a tree farm, would represent a nice estate that should hold its value for our grandchildren, when.

I think the contractor, Lou Dolbow, enjoyed the project. We took him in our four-wheel drive Toyota deep into the wilderness and said, "Build it here." We put colored bands around trees to mark where the access road should be. He had to arrange to build a half-mile road to that spot, and then build the house, deep in the jungle adjacent to the young slash pines. "Don't hurt the rattlesnakes," I warned. The power company wanted to cut a 25-foot-wide swath through the center of the tree farm; Lou hassled until they agreed to bury the line beside the new road. The bulldozer man got lost, and I showed him the route. Right in front of him was a little magnolia. "Curve the road around that tree," I said. Even so, some of its roots got chopped; we're nursing that tree along, and I think it will survive. We have a beautiful lane, to be called Ogre Drive, because we care about what nature offers. No, don't write to me begging for the address; this property is intended to be private. There will be a thorough description of it in my mainstream novel Firefly, but it won't be where the novel says it is.