Though energy and inspiration diminish, experience grows - the theme of parents and kids, for instance.

I was raised a right-wing Republican and was about eighteen when I had to admit to myself that in regards to the great domestic crucible of the day, civil rights and racial justice, conservatives were on the wrong side historically and morally, and that it took too much intellectual and psychological jujitsu to pretend otherwise. I didn't want to pretend anymore; I wanted to be on the right side.

My own personal experience has become more first-hand.

In essence I'm really a very traditional writer. I subscribe to the notion that, ultimately, characters do drive everything else.

The last thing I want is that sense of artifice - rather I want the reader drawn into the story and lost in it and vested in it. So the emotional connection is everything, albeit a connection on my terms.

Though energy and inspiration diminish, experience grows - the theme of parents and kids, for instance.

In my early twenties the nature of conservatism itself changed. When I identified as a fourteen-year-old conservative, it was closer to what we today think of as libertarianism - conservatism, at least for me, had been defined by Jeffersonian credos like "the best governed are the least governed" and "I have sworn eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" that were very idealistic and romantic to a kid.