My Main Reader Was My Wife Sheila,

The Danger In Writing About A World You Don't Know Very Well Is That You Can Get Lost In It, And Sometimes I'll End Up With A Hundred Pages I Don't Know What To Do With.

I Think At A Certain Point The Book Develops A Certain Weight, Or Pressure. You've Been Pushing The Rock Up The Hill For A Long Time And Then It Starts To Roll And Things Do Start To Come Together In The Last Two Thirds.

I'm Certainly Very Influenced By What You Would Call 'contemporary Headline Horror,' Stuff That Is True Crime Or For One Reason Or Another Catches Our Attention In The Media, Those Strange Cases That We End Up Obsessing About. I'm Always Influenced By Weird Anecdotes And News.

I Usually Have More Than One Thing I'm Working On At Once - I've Been Working On Three Different Novels. When I Get Stuck On One, I Hop Back And Forth.

It's Not Like It Ruined My Life, I Was Going To Say, But Then I Didn't. Because It Occurred To Me That Maybe It Had Ruined My Life, In A Kind Of Quiet Way--a Little Lie, Probably Not So Vital, Insidiously Separating Me From Everyone I Loved.