We Need The Skeletons Of Other Stories

I Like People, I Really Do. I Like Meeting People. But Most Of The Time I Would Rather Be At Home Reading A Book Than Reading In A Bookstore. It's A Performance, And It Ends Up Being All Right, And Then You Have A Nice Shot Of Bourbon Afterwards, And It's All Good. I Want To Please People. I Want To Be Nice. I Want To Be Liked. As A Result I Say Yes To Everything. But It Takes A Lot Of Vital Energy Out Of Me.

I'm An Anxious Person In General, But Something About Being Pregnant And Awaiting The Release Of My First Book, The Monsters Of Templeton, Made Me Into An Insane Anxious Person. I Didn't Sleep At Night. I Ended Up Sleeping All Day. In A Strange Way I Felt Like The World Was Going To End. I Found Myself So Deeply Depressed At Times That I Started To Read About Happiness, And That Took Me Into Books About Idealism And Utopianism. Reading Books About People Who Tried To Build Utopian Societies Of Different Kinds Gave Me A Kind Of Lift.

I Think Attempting To Make Art Is A Utopian Process In Itself, Definitely. Nothing I Do Is Ever Equal To The Ideas In My Head. You Do The Best You Can, You Do It With Patience And Love, And Then You Give Up. The Moment You Give Up Is When You Know The Book Is Done.

In The End, Fiction Is The Craft Of Telling Truth Through Lies.

As With Most Of My Work, I Started From The Abstract, From Research, Building An Intellectual Model That Slowly Became Internalized When The Characters Came Alive. It's Fascinating What Happens To The Model You've So Assiduously Assembled When Characters Are Allowed To Run Rampant: Things You Thought Essential Are Broken And Other Things Are Vastly Improved.