The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.

I've done as many as 20 or 30 drafts of a story. Never less than 10 or 12 drafts.

I am a cigarette with a body attached to it

Write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?

In short, everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well.

But he stays by the window, remembering that life. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else—the cold and where he'd go in it—was outside, for a while anyway.

and did you get what you wanted from this life even so? i did.