By the time I finished the book [All Alone in the Universe], Robin Roy was saying, "More pictures!"

I do like to be surprised.

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

I had read [Charles] Dickens's novels were often published serially. I thought it would be fun to write a book, just sitting down and writing a chapter every day, not knowing what would happen next. So that's how I wrote the first draft. And then of course I had to go back and make sure everything worked and change things.

I do love that discovery of when you're trying to figure out how to make something work, and it happens in a way that you didn't predict.

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

I creep over to my chair and sit there with my notebook and my thermos of coffee. It's my best time for thinking, because I haven't started thinking about anything else yet, and the thoughts can kind of go in and out of my head.