I'm always pointing things out to native New Yorkers that I think are weird about this place and their culture and all that. But I feel like my friends and family from California feel like I've totally "become a New Yorker."

It's cold water in the face to realize you're not nearly as special and as unusual as you might have thought when you were an alienated teenager.

It's important to make a distinction between becoming more precise and becoming better.

And with this sort of increased visibility, there's more money going around in the industry, and it changes a lot, in terms of who gets into the business as a creator, who sticks with it, and who gets pushed out. And I do think it's sort of too bad that what once was a safe haven for truly eccentric, outsider artists is no longer that thing. But there are definitely pros and cons. You could also look at it as bringing in a more diverse crowd.

For a stretch of time, I got really caught up in the idea that what people liked about my work was that I was a young guy who was trying to be cool by writing about young people and a certain kind of Bay Area culture that I was tangentially a part of.

I sense a real difference in my work from the time I was younger and single and more involved in the world of music and going out to bars and all that. There were points at which I was trying to use my art to reflect positively on myself, to almost be flirtatious through the work.

In terms of e-books, though, I haven't quite gotten to the bottom of it yet, but for some reason everybody I know seems to want to engage me on that topic, or convert me. I think there are a lot of people who just want to hear me embrace e-books or finally say, 'OK, I bought an iPad and it's awesome!" There are a lot of people who would get a kick out of it, that's for sure.