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

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.

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

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

There are so many people we could become, and we leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years?

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'm certainly very influenced by what you would call "contemporary headline horror," stuff that is true crime or for one reason or another catches our attention in the media, those strange cases that we end up obsessing about. I'm always influenced by weird anecdotes and news. And, you know, lastly, probably things that have happened to me in my own life.