I'm always working on something. Addiction never gets any credit, always talked about as a total liability, and I'll admit that most of its traits aren't positive in our lives. But there's one amazing thing it gave me: a tireless work ethic.

My job as the novelist is to present the whole case, then the reader gets to render her verdict.

My tunnel vision allows me to have a longer work day than most writers. I'm thankful for that.

It was important to buy into the fact that the nine hundred pages an end-reader never sees are just as valuable as the ones that are bound and placed on the shelf.

Yes, things happened to me - brutal things - but I'm not going to give them so much clout by dwelling on them, empowering them to haunt my heart years after the events transpired. And no good comes from that. These ghosts don't need us to help them stay alive. If we're after real deal healing, these ghosts must desiccate.

For the book to succeed, it has to have equal parts ugliness and beauty, counterpoints adding up to emotional complexity. To me, there's a dignity in letting your art be emotionally complex.

My musical sensibilities were formed around punk rock, that quintessential dilution of an art that's both ugly and lovely at the same time.