I made a drawing for a book I'm working . It's a little drawing of a girl who's ashamed and upset and hides in the corner of the closet. It's the kind of drawing that I feel like I'm really good at.

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

In the bedroom time I have generated thoughts, and then in the studio I take those thoughts and try to shape them into something.

Ideas mostly come from the work itself. Often when I'm drawing, the words will be bouncing around in my head, and when I'm writing, ideas about the drawing happen.

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.

I do like to be surprised.

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.