I Don't Feel Like I Have The

Night Was Falling. Birds Were Singing. Birds Were, It Occurred To Me To Say, Enacting A Frantic Celebration Of Day's End. They Were Manifesting As The Earth's Bright-colored Nerve Endings, The Sun's Descent Urging Them Into Activity, Filling Them Individually With Life Nectar, The Life Nectar Then Being Passed Into The World, Out Of Each Beak, In The Form Of That Bird's Distinctive Song, Which Was, In Turn, An Accident Of Beak Shape, Throat Shape, Breast Configuration, Brain Chemistry: Some Birds Blessed In Voice, Others Cursed; Some Squeaking, Others Rapturous.

If I'm Writing A Story And You're Reading It, Or Vice Versa, You Took Time Out Of Your Day To Pick Up My Book. I Think The One Thing That Will Kill That Relationship Is If You Feel Me Condescending To You In The Process. And How Does That Happen? Well, It Happens When I Know More Than You Do, And When I Know That I Know More Than You Do, And I'm Holding It Back From You. So That I Can Then Manipulate You At The End. You Know, You Think About Like In A Dating Situation How Terrible That Would Be, It's The Same Thing With A Book.

I Don't Really Do Much Social Media. I Just Don't Like It That Much. I've Trained Myself To Write Very Slowly For A Lot Of Money So It Really Galls Me To Write Quickly For Free.

One Of The Principals Of Composition, I Would Say, In Fiction, Is You Want To Do What You Can Do A Lot Of. You Want To Do What You're Enthusiastic About And What Rings Your Bell. In This Case, Almost Every Decision I Made Was On That Basis.

There Was One Sequence Of Days [making Lincoln In The Bardo] When I Had Halfway Decided To Use The Historical Nuggets, But I Wasn't Quite Sure It Would Work. I'd Be In My Room For Six Or Seven Hours, Cutting Up Bits Of Paper With Quotes And Arranging Them On The Floor, With This Little Voice In My Head Saying, "hey, This Isn't Writing!" But At The End Of That Day, I Felt That The Resulting Section Was Doing Important Emotional Work