Writing about women's sexuality is very scary for me because I'm always afraid I'll get it wrong.

I was worried that, as a college teacher, if I wrote too much about intergenerational sex my students would be creeped out.

Plot and scene are still the hardest things for me, though I think they're the building blocks of what makes a story work.

One of the things I rarely do is write about sex.

I've always been a horror movie fan, since I was a kid. And I was also a really scared kid. I was easily scared of the dark. One of the ways I would try and get away from my fear of the dark was to pretend like the monsters were my friends.

Writing a short story is a little like walking into a dark room, finding a light and turning it on. The light is the end of the story.

Writing short stories was kind of like I was cheating the whole time, in some way. I went back and forth between writing the novels and sort of sneaking out to work on stories occasionally. These stories were written over the last 10 years or so, as I was taking breaks from the novels I've written.