As long as we remember a person, they're not really gone. Their thoughts, their feelings, their memories, they become a part of us.

I have any number of completely dark obsessions and fascinations, and none of this was present in my profile or my growing profile as a writer.

She remembered no one at all. She remembered one day thinking: I am alone. There is no I but I. She lived in the dark. She taught herself to walk in the light, though it was not easy.

One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy - or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use - is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book.

I'm a workmanlike writer. I show up every day and treat it like a job. The old rule that writing is like any other job, the first rule is that you must show up. I'm at the keyboard from 9 to 4 every day.

And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction, especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.

There's an outline for each of the books that I adhere to pretty closely, but I'm not averse to taking it in a new direction, as long as I can get it back to where I need it to go.