I'm just a dog person. I love dogs very much, especially big ones, hounds, and retrievers. I think they are funny and often have good senses of humor. Plus, they give unconditional love.

I want people to read them and enjoy the experience and feel entertained. A lot of the best stories revolve around strange people, people whose decisions and logic and circumstances are not easily understood.

I wanted to do a collection where the narrator is constant throughout, so that there's a little unity.

I want the situations and plots to be surprising and unusual.

I'm interested in other animals too though. There's the slug in "Mollusks", and I wrote a story about bees and one about a cat which got thrown out a window by mistake, but those never made it into the collection.

I never really set out to research any of these stories. I try to lead an interesting life though. I guess the closest I came to research was when I applied to work at the state mental institution in Austin, TX. I wanted to work the night shift like Ken Kesey did when he wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I thought that might inspire me to write a book that great.

Some of the stories in Dogwalker were written as long as four years ago, but I wouldn't say I've been working on this collection for four years. I have always been a little unsure of whether I could make it as a writer so I've held other jobs and worked on other projects this whole time.