My sixth-grade teacher, back in Duluth, gave us a great homework assignment one year: Pick a book we loved, write an epilogue for it, and mail the chapter to the author via their publisher. This was a startling concept to me; up until then, I had assumed that all writers were dead. This was one of those funny misconceptions of childhood--sort of similar to the idea that teachers don't exist outside of the classroom.

And surely many of the authors I read actually were dead--L.M. Montgomery, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Mark Twain--but my teacher assured me that many, many other writers were still alive.

So I picked an author, wrote my chapter, sent it off, and we moved on to something else less captivating--diagramming sentences, maybe, or spelling. Winter came.

And then one day a letter arrived, to me, from Marguerite Henry, author of "Misty of Chincoteague." What a thrill! Instead of taking me to task for my egregious addition to her already-perfectly-complete book, she praised my chapter and thanked me for sending it.

I no longer have the letter, but I do remember that she wrote, "If I were your teacher, I'd give you a Double-A-Plus!" and I thought, "Yeah, good idea!" (My teacher did not agree.)

All of which brings me, in a very roundabout way, to Amazon's latest scheme, in which you, too, will be able to determine first-hand that not all authors are dead and that some of them, like Marguerite Henry, are very nice. The new plan is something called @author, and it allows you to e-mail questions directly to authors, either from your Kindle or from the Amazon author page.

Marguerite Henry and Wesley Dennis, author and illustrator of "Misty of Chincoteague"

There are, of course, several caveats--for now, only a handful of authors are taking part in this. And there's no guarantee that the author will answer you. "Authors won't be able to answer all questions, but readers can answer other readers' questions from the Author Page too," Amazon's Jason Kirk writes on his Kindle blog.(This seems less than satisfying to me.)

Some of the authors who've agreed to give this a whirl are Susan Orlean, Ted Dekker and James Rollins. All are, thankfully, alive. No word on whether or not they're interested in reading any extra chapters you might care to write.