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.

Dogwalker is a book of fiction, with characters based on the types of people who truly exist in the world. I've seen them and know them - some of them I know really well. Although the stories are sometimes gritty and unsettling, my hope is that in the end they hit a positive note.

I'm not very disciplined. I tend to write late at night because I get distracted during the day.

I know that some of the things which happen in these stories are not likely, but sometimes I wonder if they are not possible in some way.

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.

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.

I was living in a house with 11 dogs and all I thought about was dogs. I never had sex with any of them though.