Whenever I try to map things out they inevitably change. Which doesn't mean I don't map them out — I just try to embrace the better ideas that come along as my fingers are flying around the keyboard mid-draft!

I never remember nice dreams; only the bad ones stick.

My portal to another world was fiction.

There was a girl who could fly, a boy who had bees living inside him, a brother and sister who could lift boulders over their heads.

Strange, I thought, how you can be living your dreams and your nightmares at the very same time.

I've never really been interested in the vintage photos people pay lots of money for -- civil war tintypes or old daguerrotypes of famous people. Nor do I have any interest in the really gross, dark stuff that some people pay top-dollar, like post-mortem photos of babies (yuck) or press photos of old murder scenes or whatever. I collect in these little niches most other people don't care about -- dark-and-weird-but-fun -- and photos that have been written on, which a lot of sellers think hurts their value. All of which is good news for me!

I liked this idea: that peculiarness wasn't a deficiency, but an abundance; that it wasn't we who lacked something normals had, but they who lacked peculiarness. That we were more, not less.