Anticipated
Frequently Asked Questions

1. Who are you?
2. Will you review my book or movie?
3. If I send you a review, will you include it on your site?
4. May I link to your site?
5. Why did you pick the name interrogation reports?
6. How do you generate your site?

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1. Who are you?

   My name is Terry Jeffress. I was born in southern California and lived there until the summer when Star Wars came out (1977). I moved with my parents to Connecticut and went to middle and high school there. I moved to Utah to attend Brigham Young University. When I ran out of money for school, I joined the National Guard, where I became a Russian linguist interrogator. I eventually graduated from the University of Utah with dual bachelor degrees in Math and English.

   Professionally I have worked as a technical writer for software companies. When 9/11 hit, the bottom fell out of the computer industry, I got laid off from six jobs in two years, and I left technical writing for the customer service industry. (During this time, I also didn't write many reviews.) I currently work for one of the major phone providers selling residential phone service.

   I have always made lists. Starting at about eight-years-old, I kept lists of all the books I had read and the movies I had seen. Some time in the late 1980s, I started writing reviews of the books I read and in 1992 created this site to archive my reviews. Around 1998, I started adding movie reviews to the site.

2. Will you review my book or movie?

   Maybe. As you can see from the titles I have reviewed, I like science fiction, fantasy, technical books, and books about writing. I also read some children's fiction, usually so I can monitor my children's book reports. If you think your book or movie might interest me, I suggest that you send a plain-text description of your title by email to <tjeffress@i-reports.info>. I try to respond to all requests to let you know if I would like a review copy.

   If you want to throw caution to the wind, you can send your book or movie to following address:

   Terry L Jeffress
   9741 S Redwood Rd
   South Jordan, UT 84095
   USA

   Please note that I cannot promise that I will read your book or watch your movie. I will almost definitely not review, electronic books, self-published works, or works published through Xlibris or other on-demand publishers. Frankly, if you cannot interest a major publishing house in your work, then you probably need to invest more time revising your work before you force it on reviewers or the public. Also, do not send me prerelease copies of movies. At the first scrolling message telling me that I do not own the movie and to call the MPAA to report inappropriate sales, I will turn off the movie and throw it away.

3. If I send you a review, will you include it on your site?

   No. But, I do maintain another site where your review might fit. If you have read a book about writing or the writing industry, send me a review, and I will include it in the misc.writing Recommended Reading List.

4. May I link to your site?

   Of course you may. I ask that you send me an email message to let me know that you have created the link, but only as a boost my ego and not as a prerequisite to approval. Please note that I don't exchange links. At one time I did try to maintain a list of writing-related links, but most went stale after only a few months. I don't have the time to research new links and continually chech the old links, so I gave up. Besides, Google does such a good job that you can generate your own list of timely, relevant links in a matter of seconds.

5. Why did you pick the name interrogation reports?

   I got the idea in 1991 while I attended the interrogation course at the Army Intelligence School in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where I learned how to write interrogation reports after interrogating a prisoner of war. I didn't enjoy the nightly get-smashed-at-the-NCO-club outings, so I pretty much stayed in the barracks and read a lot of books. Interrogation reports and reviews serve a similar function: they summarize the information contained in the source so the reader can make more informed tactical or even strategic decisions.

6. How do you generate your site?

   I write my reviews as a series of tagged, flat database files. I started with the refer format but changed many of the tags to suit my own needs. A Perl script then reads in the database files, creates various indexes, and generates all the pages in this portion of the site. I wrote a custom version of the script to generate the AML-List Reviews Archive. I did try an XML version of the site, but Perl handles access to tagged variables much faster than the same searches in an XML tree, so I abandoned the XML version. I will send you the site generation script if you really want to see it.

   Please feel free to send me any suggestions for improving the site or reports of typos or other errors at <tjeffress@i-reports.info>.