Maybe love, like suffering, is relative.

I've never been able to sleep very much, even when I was a kid. I used to hate being forced to lay in bed in the darkness, and just shifting in bed and staring at the shadows.

If no one knows you, then you are no one.

That's how I work, whether with stories or novels - they start with an image that comes to me in a daydream, and a lot of times I'm walking around with these pictures in my head for awhile before I start writing.

I wanted to write a horror story. But in some ways, I have always thought of myself as a kind of ghost-story/horror writer, though most of the time the supernatural never actually appears on stage.

I'm working with fragments a lot of the time and the connective tissue isn't there yet. I think of it the way comics work. You have a block here and a block here, and there's this white space in between. Somehow your mind makes the leap to connect those two blocks. Finding a way to trick your mind into connecting those blocks is one of the fun things for me about writing. You can have those leaps that will emerge into something, if you're lucky.

The earliest impetuses for writing, for me, were simply the strange things I happened to notice in my everyday life, stuff I read about in the grocery store tabloids my mom bought, situations that struck me as compelling, anecdotes I'd heard, images, words, metaphors.