There's always something else to work on and different solutions to these problems in the next thing. We each have a certain set of obsessions which we each cycle through.

There's relief in white space for the reader.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, I felt myself drawn to writing a female character who was pretty flawed and not very virtuous or wonderful or attractive in these ways that throughout literary history we've come to expect female characters to be.

Even while I was working on the novel I would also write short stories as relief, just to be in a wieldier world that could negotiated more easily and more quickly. In the novel, I even changed the narrator from a man to a woman.

In my writing classes, I don't outlaw any genre writing.

Synesthesia has interested me for a long time, both as a literary device and as a puncturing of the membranes that organize how the world comes into someone's head.

For me, the genders are an essential element of numbers and letters, not something that could be removed from them.