If you can't pay it back, pay it forward.

One of the nice things about publishing with Amazon is that the window for marketing is much longer than with a traditional publisher because these titles are not coming off of shelves.

Sometime around 2006, I decided I had missed my true calling as a young adult author.

When I write, my goal is to delve deeply enough into the human experience to find a sort of universality. Once you dig down underneath surface differences, we are all human beings. And all human beings want essentially the same things at our core. We want to love and be loved. We want to be safe. We want our loved ones to be safe.

Whenever we can, we try to talk to students. If I can, I'll invite kids from a school to a sound check and take questions from them. I want to show them it's cool to play the trombone. Kids are influenced by what's accessible to them. It's hard for kids to be introduced to music other than what they see on TV and video.

We can't afford not to fully fund education.

My own, purely personal view is that reading, study, poetry, and scientific experiment might be more rewarding than a job or children, so I would never advise anyone against university if they're going for the right reasons.

A lot of people have said, 'Why not take a smaller school head job?' I honestly feel my growth was better being in a large program, being around Coach Saban, and learning how to manage a lot of the tough situations you deal with in the media.