Here's my theory: I think both fiction and role-playing games involve a narrative journey. When that journey never ends, it feeds an addictive cycle. When that journey has an end, it brings us back to ourselves and to our own lives. This return allows us to reflect. Perhaps this is why I prefer a closed structure for books and games.

Women hate each other in science. You know why? Because the few that are around were trained by men. They survived by being twice as good and twice as competitive and twice as badass as the guys.

I think poetry bridges text and image. Poetry is visual in its imagery - but it requires close attention to words themselves. Words become jewels in poetry, while they are often tools in other genres.

Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal from it, but when you sit down to write, forget about worshiping greatness and fetishizing masterpieces.

I do not think novels are necessarily more worthwhile than games. A novel can be a trivial waste of time, and a game can teach. Whatever the genre, I think a successful narrative allows us to participate, to try on new roles and points of view. At their best, novels and games serve as vehicles for discovery.

I suspect the popularity of young adults and dystopian novels has something to do with a desire for allegory and old-fashioned morality tales. In fact, you might find your religious framework here in dystopian, post-apocalyptic fiction. Here, and in videogames, you find strict codes of authority, the "rules of the game," the life-or-death quest and struggle that people crave.

In novels like 'Kaaterskill Falls', I've been able to write sympathetically about religious people - and beyond that, I've been able to take a religious point of view - because belief does not anger or embarrass me.