Michael Shilling is the author of Rock Bottom, which Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company published in 2009. This summer, the book will be adapted to the stage by the Landless Theater Company in Washington DC. Mr. Shilling, whose short stories have appeared in The Sun, Fugue, and Other Voices, teaches at Seattle University, plays the drums in a soul band, and is working on a novel, Midnight Hippies, which involves people running out of time while running after each other. It takes place in sunny Miami, rainy Seattle, and snowy California.