I've been writing all my life. Even though I didn't have sort of careerist aspirations as a writer, it was very much my identity.

One thing I am learning is to slow down. Multitasking is great, but I when try to do everything at warp speed I just end up with typos and stress.

The critics and the reviewers are more frightening than anything else!

I think that the project of being alive is to be alive. So there will always be twists and turns and steps forward and steps back, but that's just your life. There is no sort of place at which to arrive, and I think that the more one focuses on an end point, the harder it is to get there. It's like the horizon, sort of ever receding, ever receding, ever receding.

I think that people have some sort of vision that everybody is moving towards perfection, and that there is some sort of set steps or something like that that you can move through to get to that place, and that that's sort of the project of being alive.

You have to find a way of shutting the future out and focusing on the writing. One of the problems I'll have with writing my second book is getting back into a situation where I think about the words on the page rather than the publishing industry, or success, or any kind of readership I may now have. I'll have to do what writers do, which is focus on the story and nothing else.

There's a stereotype that to be a strong black woman is to be strong about being black.