It's a bit scary to see my book come true: the recent (if minor) LA earthquakes, Hurricane Sandy, the Boston bomber, and so on - much of it stoppable, I think, and yet I, too, am also guilty of passivity.

For me, even when I was pregnant, I wondered, Should we even have children if we're bringing them into this horrible, scary world? But I did have a child, despite these fears - or because of them - and these fears are both contemporary and as old as time.

have a much harder time writing stories than novels. I need the expansiveness of a novel and the propulsive energy it provides. When I think about scene - and when I teach scene writing - I'm thinking about questions. What questions are raised by a scene? What questions are answered? What questions persist from scene to scene to scene?

All crises, once averted, become jokes.

I did a lot of this through writing flashbacks. Many of the flashbacks took place at Cal's school and I eventually cut them because they didn't seem essential and they slowed the pace of the story in the first third of the book. They were essential to me, though, in that I learned about my characters.

I tossed off a mention of the pirates early on. And they became integral to the backstory. Sometimes now I imagine them in the woods. They scare me. All men. Dirty and wearing red.

California seemed to me to be all about secrets and the need for safety. And this leads to this thematic messiness I'm still trying to figure out what to do with. I mean, when it comes to the themes, this is nothing like an Atwood novel.