I'm about to start something new. I'm waiting to be whelmed. The whelming as you start something new is quite something.

No matter what losses happen in a given season, the Red Sox always have next year.

As a writer, my main objective is to tell the story urgently - as if whispering it into one ear - and to know the characters intimately.

While I was in college becoming a good Catholic I was also becoming a writer - one haunted by Catholicism.

I try not to divide plot and character. I get to know a character by what they want and fear and how those internal forces play out in their lives.

Different genres allow me to not feel so hemmed in by my own voice, tics, style.

I don't know when I'm writing dark. I don't know when I'm writing funny or even heartbreaking. I'm always just trying to write it true.