All Novels Are Sequels; Influence Is Bliss.

The World Like Our Heads Was Meant To Be Escaped From, They Are Prisons World And Head Alike.

I Don't Have A Problem With Many Uses Of The Word Genre, Just Certain Ones. I Have The Most Trouble When These Labels Are Used To Prevent Discussion, To Prevent A Work From Being Taken Seriously As Literature. When We Say "genre," We Generally Mean "something Crappy," Something That Would Be Sold In An Airport.

Every Universe, Our Own Included, Begins In Conversation. Every Golem In The History Of The World, From Rabbi Hanina's Delectable Goat To The River-clay Frankenstein Of Rabbi Judah Loew Ben Bezalel, Was Summoned Into Existence Through Language, Through Murmuring, Recital, And Kabbalistic Chitchat -- Was, Literally, Talked Into Life.

I Wanted To Give Readers The Feeling Of Knowing The Characters, A Mental Image.

We Are Accustomed To Repeating The Cliché, And To Believing, That 'our Most Precious Resource Is Our Children.' But We Have Plenty Of Children To Go Around, God Knows, And As With Doritos, We Can Always Make More. The True Scarcity We Face Is Practicing Adults, Of People Who Know How Marginal, How Fragile, How Finite Their Lives And Their Stories And Their Ambitions Really Are But Who Find Value In This Knowledge, Even A Sense Of Strange Comfort, Because They Know Their Condition Is Universal, Is Shared.