This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.

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.

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

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.

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

One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.

If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.