I love the idea that more people would read short fiction. I think it's such a humanizing form. It softens the boundaries between people.

It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.

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.

Writing a story I am just trying to find some little interesting thing to start out with: something small, even trivial. Preferably something that doesn't have a lot of thematic or political baggage - a little crumb that is interesting.

The artist's job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn't damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined.

I was thinking about the legacy of ghosts in fiction, and specifically the moral power of those Dickensian ghosts. Because a ghost can be a very powerful but also manipulative element.

Goodbye. I'm leaving because I'm bored.