Fiction just has a lot more room for ambivalence and internal conflict, contradiction, and for me that sums up so much of what people felt after 9/11 - confusion even. And I think that's hard to capture in journalism.

So the premise of 'The Submission' is that there's an anonymous competition to design a 9/11 memorial and it's won by an American Muslim, an architect born and raised in Virginia, and his name is Mohammad Khan.

[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it.

Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.

There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.

Sorrow can be a bully.

Work less than you think you should. It took me a while to realise there was a point each day when my creativity ran out and I was just producing words - usually lousy ones - for their own sake. And nap: it helps to refresh the brain, at least mine.