I struggle with staying clean every day, and what really keeps me from doing something stupid is my daughter.

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.

Shamefulness is always a huge part of my characterizations. I like protagonists that reveal, either through "honesty" in their various thought processes or via their actions, perhaps telling us things they're not so keen on disclosing through their interactions with the outside world. Probably both during the duration of a novel.

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.

No matter what we've done, no matter the disappointments and sullied blunders, today is the opportunity to do right by ourselves.

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

Today is going to be free of the past. Today, the past can't hurt me.