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.

In some ways I'm very structured.

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.

I [drinking coffee] for about an hour, I get dressed and go down in my studio, and that's a different kind of working.

It's really daunting when you have just spent a lot of time on something to think about tossing it out. But once you've started something better that's working right, then it's pretty easy to let the first one go.

I don't like things to be static when I'm working.

I started thinking about [ what book is going to go next] when I was working on As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth.