Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.

Appearances are not reality; but they often can be a convincing alternative to it. You can control appearances most of the time, but facts are what they are. When the facts are too sharp, you can craft a cheerful version of the situation and cover the facts the way that you can covered a battered old four-slice toaster with a knitted cozy featuring images of kittens.

here in the summer desert, winter found my blood

If I had to write a rough draft, all the way through and then go back and start over, I probably would just stop writing. I wouldn't find that interesting. I would feel that I had committed so many things to the paper that I couldn't easily undo because one thing leads to the next, the interconnectedness, the sequences would make it very hard to change something that simply didn't work.

I imagined a life that turned out to be pretty much exactly like the one I've had. That fascinates me endlessly. I wake up many mornings, and it almost wouldn't surprise me if I woke up from it and it was all a dream.

Tommy told Sal about the strange white-cloth figure with black stitches that he had found on the front porch. "Sounds like Pillsbury Doughboy gone punk," Sal said.

Not funny ha ha, funny weird.