It happened the way I come up with any story, which is that I took elements of my own life and put them into the story, but in a very mixed-up way.

When we tell stories about things that are important - love, fear, beauty - we change the way people think about the world. Writers are, or should be, truth-tellers even when the stories themselves are fantasy.

I'm sure scientists would point to specific brain chemicals, but I think love is actually a kind of magic. It's what allows things to happen, people to be creative, the world to change. Great things come out of love - for other people, for art, for beauty.

I'm working on a poetry collection for Papaveria Press . It fills me with trepidation - poetry is something I'm much more self-conscious about than prose.

It's very difficult to put in the work unless you believe that what you're doing is significant in some way.

The only thing worth thinking about, when I write a story, is whether I like it, whether I want to write it, whether it excites me.

I talked on my blog recently about "uncommon sense." Common sense is called "common" because it reflects cultural consensus. It's common sense to get a good job and save for retirement. But I think we all also have an "uncommon sense," an individual voice that tells us what we're meant to do.