I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them.

But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys.

And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.

...water laughing softly down a black stone wall.

It's turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth.

I had this idea that I could hire myself out as a person to go on archeological digs and dig, without any training! I actually wrote to a number of archeology departments and offered up my services.

That adage about 'Write what you know' is basically the opposite of the way I function. I write about what I'm curious to find out.