I generally have an idea where I want to go, but I don't know how I'm going to get there.

I'm heavily influenced by Edward Ardizzone, how he has people talking in little speech bubbles. I love those. And also Edward Gorey. Those are two of my favorite people.

With most of my books, there are some parts that pop up right away, and other parts I have to wait for.

I don't want to make myself sound that spontaneous, because I'm not.

Some of it just involved thinking about, for example, the different kinds of science, what chemistry is.

Often they do go back and forth the whole way, and I don't know until the very end what the last line of the book is going to be. That was true here - the very last line of the book was the last thing that happened.

We had a dog, Lucky, who was fourteen years old. For the last year of his life, I would take him on these walks that were long but didn't cover much distance.