When I was fifteen I believed that sex was nearly the same thing as softball.

that crack of the bat against a ball has been my mantra, a sound I hear in desperate moments, at times when I crave total satisfaction, a sound I hear over and over when I want something very badly but can't express what it is.

My job is to tell good stories, convey meanings, invoke emotion as well as I can. I'd rather be doing that than anything else.

I love my work. What's more fun than playing with imagination? I also believe storytelling is the most powerful way people communicate with one another, interpret our lives, share our dreams, even form our futures. So when I sit down to write every day, I keep the fun, and also what I consider a large cultural project that connects people, at the center of what I'm doing.

I completely agree that place is the most emotionally resonant aspect of a story. Our environment affects us every bit as much as our relationships with other people. I love work that recognizes that.

Writing is incredibly hard. But I want to do it. That said, I make it the top priority in every day, which for me means the first hours after getting out of bed in the morning. I've been doing it enough years now that I don't even think about waiting for my muse to show up, I just get to work.

About writing I learned that always, always, always it's necessary to haunt your settings. I'm a big researcher. All my fiction is based on tons of digging. But the vital importance of actually traveling to the settings of a novel really hit me. And it's not just the setting details, not just the visuals and other sensory data, that will pop. You'll find surprising clues that swerve your story in whole new, deeper, surprising, more organic ways.