Everything we are is anchored in our childhoods. The drama comes in how we deal with it. Are we slaves to our past, or can we rise above it? This is the stuff of great stories.

I had a big Akita, Yoshi, who was fabulous. I loved him. We lost him when he was 12, and I've never been able to replace him. Normally, most people lose a pet and get another and keep going on. But it just felt wrong to me; it felt disloyal.

L.A.'s magic has let me see every level of the dream.

It's easy to sound good. All you do is leave in the parts where you act tough and forget the parts where you get shoved around.

My family was all police and hard hats at the refineries; they didn't know what to think about me. So I became a closet writer.

People want you to be ordinary.

My books come to me in images, and sometimes the image is at the beginning of the book, and sometimes it's simply a flash somewhere in the middle.