I love horror movies. I consider myself a horror author, sometimes.

I write out of enthusiasm. Momentum that comes from a new idea. Eagerness to explore. I also write out of fear - fear of losing an idea - fear of feeling stagnant.

I feel like having an actual taxidermy-ed mammal would get gross, like its hair would get dirty and stuff.

I'm not disciplined in terms of scheduling. I work best late at night, but I can't do that when I'm on a TV show - our hours are roughly 10-6:30, so I have to go to sleep at a reasonable hour. So I'll sometimes write fiction for an hour or two in the evenings, or several hours on the weekend afternoons - unless I'm actively writing a script for the show I'm working on, in which case there's no time to write fiction at all.

I encourage all novelists to move to TV right now, that is the way to go. I was living in New York working at a bank as a day job about seven years ago. I was writing novels at night and decided, "Wow, there's so much great TV, and they're telling the complex, interesting, psychologically nuanced stories that, as a novelist, you dream of telling. And it's a healthy, exciting, thriving medium - that's where I need to be."

We're lucky to be in the middle of a TV renaissance. It's the healthiest storytelling medium in our culture.

I was tired of working in an office and I wanted to make a living telling stories. There are not many people who find a way to do this.