Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.

Much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum. To oppose them, to suggest that one category excludes the other, always feels bogus to me. The great Leonard Michaels line is "I wanted proximity to darkness, strangeness"? That's what I'd say I want from a book, regardless of where it falls on the fantastical spectrum - that suspense connected to a particular human character, rather than just some mechanized plot.

I would love to travel around the world working for a travel company taking students abroad on cultural immersion trips.

But if you kept thinking about a fight you’d lost, Mom said, you were programming yourself to lose again.

And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.

I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes.

I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway.