You Can't Tell People How To Feel

You Can Go On Like This For A Very Long Time, And No One Will Notice. You Keep Thinking You're Going To Hit Some Sort Of Bottom, But I'm Here To Tell You: There Is No Bottom.

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. And, You Know, Lastly, Probably Things That Have Happened To Me In My Own Life.

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.

Writing Short Stories Was Kind Of Like I Was Cheating The Whole Time, In Some Way. I Went Back And Forth Between Writing The Novels And Sort Of Sneaking Out To Work On Stories Occasionally. These Stories Were Written Over The Last 10 Years Or So, As I Was Taking Breaks From The Novels I've Written.

I Know A Lot Of People Don't Listen To Music When They're Writing Because It Distracts Them, But For Me It's Almost A Way To Get Into The Self-hypnotic State That I Need To Be In To Write.