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.

I start with an image, then I go from the image toward exploring the situation. Then I write a scene, and from the scene I find the character, from the character I find the larger plot. It's like deductive reasoning - I start with the smaller stuff and work backward.

My main reader was my wife Sheila, and I haven't written a lot since she died.

You can't tell people how to feel when they read your work. You can only hope to connect.

For me, the process of writing a novel happens mostly in your head before you actually start writing.

I still think about the writers I loved when I was a kid.

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.