In the publishing world, most editors are probably women. So I don't see the publishing world as a male-dominated one, especially within fiction.

The sound of the pages turning was the sound of magic. The dry liquid feel of paper under fingertips was what magic felt like.

I'm finding that success is way more time-consuming than failure ever was.

Writing is nearly always a matter of finding whatever your brain needs to trick it into being creative, and in my case, a tiny little bit of fact just seems to work.

I'm a huge planner, more and more so as the years go by.

I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened.

The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.