How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end. As for flying, Dose never even glanced at the sky. Flying was a summer within a summer, a whim. So why think of it at all?

I don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving.

But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.

Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.

It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.

Consensual reality is both fragile and elastic, and it heals like the skin of a bubble.

My writing life is pretty simple - I try to work every day, almost always in the mornings - and I can only write fiction effectively for about three or at the most four hours. No big mysteries, I just sit down and try to advance the cause a little bit every day.