I'd say the music influences the writing - the music and rhythm of the prose - much more than the writing influences the music.

It took me seven years of writing before I published my first story. And then, the publications trickled in over the next five years.

I have an MFA in writing. It is debatable if they are right for everyone, but I had a mentor who really changed my life, so it worked for me.

You can't hide behind the guise of fiction. No matter how autobiographical a fictional scene is, you can always tell the reader - in protecting yourself - that you made it up.

I think every narrator is an unreliable narrator. In its classic definition - an unreliable narrator is one who reveals something they don't know themselves to be revealing. We all do that.

There's something known as "memory conformity," also known as "social contagion of memory," which refers to a situation where one person's telling of a memory influences another person's account of that same experience.

For me, addiction never really included telling myself that everything was okay. By the time I was deep in my addictions, I knew things were pretty bad and I had no control over them.