The best piece of advice I ever received about being a writer came from my brother Lee. I was just starting out and he told me that if I wanted to have a long career, I had to be versatile, that I shouldn't just think of myself in one way, because there would come a time when maybe that one thing wasn't working out for me - and I'd still want to earn a living as a writer.

And there are rules for crime fiction. Or if not rules, at least expectations and you have to give the audience what it wants.

I think, generally, the flawed anti-hero is much more interesting than the normal hero, and that's really what we're talking about here as it relates to outlaws or renegades.

I read an interview with Daniel Woodrell once where he said something like, basically, if people had said what they said to him in a bar instead of workshop, he would have punched them...and I finally understood that when in a class with my wife. Every time someone said something about her work, I wanted to climb across the table and stab them in the neck with my pen. And these were people I liked and respected.

I was thinking a lot about the aftermath of bad choices, how people deal with the trauma of having survived trauma, if that makes sense, and so I wrote about this character's last day on the job, how after spending 15 years pretending to be a rabbi, he'd in effect become a rabbi.

All of which is mostly bullshit. The reality is that it's just like any other Ponzi scheme: the guys at the top are doing pretty well, but the guys on the bottom are doing Amway pitches in trailer parks.

I think my philosophy has evolved over the years. I started teaching almost 15 years ago and I've learned that how one student learns is obviously much different than how another student learns and so I've had to figure out how to get through to people honestly without hurting their feelings - which is no easy task just in the scope of being a human being, much less in the classroom, but which is something that is more important to me now than it was when I was 30 - and to show them a path to improving.