It is not like a premonition of death. It is as if she died a long time ago, and she just now remembered it.

People write fiction in their minds all the time - every time we read a 'human interest' news story, or a true crime tale, we find ourselves fascinated because we're trying to understand why people behave the way they do, why they make the choices they do, how we become who we become.

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

Fiction is fun because you get to steal an identity and try to make it authentic.

Even when our death is imminent, we carry the image of ourselves moving forward, alive, into the future.

I keep a daily journal of whatever weird thought comes into my mind, like when I had a dream I was in North Dakota in the middle of a blizzard and for some reason the Egyptian pyramids were there, too - that I was able to shuffle into the book.

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.