I'm told that a couple of my Russian translations are just plain terrible, though, and there may be others.

I don't do flash fiction.

Biggest influence: my mother.

It's usually quite easy to shrug and write something else instead.

Publishing is the final step in making a book; if I was afraid to publish one, I wouldn't write it in the first place.

The real world is devoid of narratives, after all. Narratives are just a thing that our brains do with facts in order to draw a line around the incomprehensible largeness of reality and wrestle it into something learnable and manipulable. Existence is devoid of plot, theme, and most of all moral.

I was heavily into AD&D in my teens (late 1970s-early 1980s) but fell off the RPG habit in the mid-80s and have never gone back to it; my lifestyle today isn't very compatible with having a regular gaming group (too much travel).