Life is a sweet mistake that happened when the world wasn't looking.

Life is a sweet mistake that happened when the world wasn't looking.

Every time I start off a book or a story I feel like I'm developing a new style or approach for that individual story alone, and it sometimes feels as if readers are looking for the same style/approach from the same writer over and over again, which hasn't helped me in the publishing biz.

I am not especially good at remembering the actualities of the world I inhabit, but I have pretty strong associative memories of how it feels to live in that world, and to wonder at its weird machinations, at any age.

I've always liked the fact that fiction takes all these pretty unquantifiable human feelings and experiences and projects them onto the page in ways that make interior human sense, even when they aren't entirely believable...

Perhaps teenagers don't interest me as much as children do since I still feel (even at 58) to be a fairly adolescent personality, especially in my enthusiasms, and I find myself an uninteresting fictional character.

For me, the main inspiration to write a story or novel is the voice of its central character, or the narrative voice of the story itself.