I don't really have any advice for people who love each other and both happen to be writers, other than one of the two people in the couple better be slightly less in the clouds all day, or else you'll both starve to death. Humans really can't survive on just coffee alone, I don't think.

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.

The rise of the anti-hero can be traced to a litany of social reasons. Post World War I, for instance, saw the blooming of some pretty dark stuff - I'm thinking of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, for instance, when "The Continental Op" shows up in Poisonville to clean up the town...and proceeds to kill something like thirty people.

They [academy writing programs] have no concept that the world has changed, that publishing has changed, that filmmaking has changed, and if you're not constantly looking at your education model and adjusting for the change, you'll find yourself teaching antiquity. Like all of these programs that won't accept students who are writing genre fiction - what an institutional ego!

I'm not Pollyanna - I know that my personality and my opinions and how I approach the teaching of writing maybe isn't exactly how it's done traditionally in the academy...wherever that academy is...but, you know, the academy is broken as it relates to many creative writing programs.

Sam took another sip of the pruno. It went down smoother this time, possibly because he no longer had feeling in his extremities.

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.