I'm very happy - if I can do even a little bit of work to get the short story out more, I'm thrilled.

I have nothing. My model is I have nothing figured out, and I'm starting with some little nugget and hoping that it will talk back to me enough to let it grow.

I heard Zen teacher one time talking about abortion, and he was saying the way that abortion makes bad karma is any time the person involved pretends that there's not a cost to the choice, one way or the other; whether you get it or don't get it, there's a cost. That's just basic responsibility, to admit that there's a cost. And the bad karma is when you pretend that the thing is free.

So much of what I am doing in my fiction is just trying to get into interesting places in terms of language or form, places that don't bore me. And this happens via hundreds of quick micro-decisions that are done "to taste," so to speak. So the experience is one of groping toward that interesting place - trying to leap away from anything that seems boring, or about which I don't have strong opinions. Essentially trying to avoid that moment where, devoid of any strong feeling, I start conceptualizing.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that whatever weirdness was going to be in there, I felt, had to be earned. And it had to be required by the emotional needs of the book.

The traveller must, of course, always be cautious of the overly broad generalisation. But I am an American, and a paucity of data does not stop me from making sweeping, vague, conceptual statements and, if necessary, following these statements up with troops.

The contours of the coming disaster expanded to include the deaths of all present.