My favorite classes were always dumb nerdy vocabulary.

Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.

I tended to be drawn to the weirder, darker stuff. Horror and sci-fi anthologies.

No, I don’t have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don’t know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge with a fur: your secret.

The folks I read as a kid really set me up. I owe a huge debt to Ray Bradbury and Madeleine L'Engle.

When I'm drafting, I suppose it's an intuitive process - figuring out when something just has a surreal glaze on it and when it grapples with something that could threaten a character's day-to-day reality.

I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.