Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can't figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times.

And indeed, I am a warmhearted and thoroughly domestic man who gets up and makes pancakes for his children and kisses them on the head when he sends them off to their day.

Before she became the Girl from Nowhere-the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years-she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.

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.

My theory of characterization is basically this: Put some dirt on a hero, and put some sunshine on the villain, one brush stroke of beauty on the villain.

There was something in the pages of these books that had the power to make him feel better about things, a life raft to cling to before the dark currents of memory washed him downstream again, and on brighter days, he could even see himself going on this way for some time. A small but passable life. And then, of course, the end of the world happened.

I was a 'Planet of the Apes'-obsessed kid.