There is your car and the open road, the fabled lure of random adventure. You stand at the verge, and you could become anything.

A lot of times in my short fiction there isn't much dramatized scene - there are a lot of short, interconnected bits, snippets of conversation, continual action, and so on. I frequently rely pretty heavily on voice.

Identity issues are hardwired into the way I think about character - it's almost as if I can't get away from them even if I want to.

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

I also have just my own limits about stuff. I'm not interested in writing graphically about sexual assault for example. I feel like the stuff that I'm fascinated by is the stuff that's part of the public imagination of what horror is. The bleakness is a different issue. I think that just stems from my personality. I wish that I offered a little more glimmer of hope sometimes.

Maybe love, like suffering, is relative.

Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life. We can picture what it would be like from another perspective.