People always think there's this huge hundred-foot-high barrier that separates doing good from doing bad. But there's not. There's nothing. There's not even a little anthill. You just take one baby step in any direction and you're already there. You've doing something awful. And your life is changed forever.

I think we all try to figure out ways to ignore the fact that life is about suffering. In the modern world, that's what we're surrounded with. We have all these little tools, such as phones and the Internet, to help us forget about suffering. Whenever you are tired, you don't have to really sit in the abyss of what it means to be alive. We always find ways to avoid it. When a ship sinks, you are sitting in it. There is no way to avoid.

All that matters to me as a reader are characters. I want characters to be real, authentic, and rounded. I will be digging into characters for at least a month. Who they are. What they are like. Outside of the story.

When I finish a book, I'll go to that file and look through them. And I'll say, these are three that really excite me and I want to do them next. You have the business part; of those three, is the publisher excited about one? Is the agent?

When I was in school, I was very much into just sports, mostly basketball, and didn't really see myself as much of a student. But once I got into college, I figured I wasn't going to be play beyond college. I started to think what was I going to do, since I wouldn't be able to make a living with basketball. There were a couple of things I liked to do. I wrote poetry, spoken word mostly.

I guess I don't really know what I want to do, either. Sometimes I feel like a shook-up bottle of soda. Like, I have all this passion that wants to explode, but I don't know where to aim it yet.

Growing up as a mixed-race kid myself, when you are in the middle of it and you're young...you don't think about it consciously. It's your reality.