Most of My Friends are two-thirds water.
Everyone knows that wizards are pigheaded and come to bad ends.
You get a lot of narrative energy from people who make really big mistakes, who act against their best interests, who do things that turn out to have serious consequences. It’s very hard make a story out of people doing the right thing over and over again.
We are sitting on our honeymoon bed in the honeymoon suite. We are in a state of honeymoon, in our honey month. These words are so sweet: honey, moon. This bed is so big, we could live on it. We have been happily marooned – honey marooned – on this bed for days.
Life is a series of sudden disappearances, leave-takings without the proper goodbyes.
Our eyes are always blind when they view the future.
The initial spark usually has something to do with panic – I’m due to turn in a story to a workshop or an editor. It’s a terrible working method.
I’m grateful when stories come in a rush, although I keep an eye on them afterwards, to see whether they hold together. It’s harder to judge the ones that took so long to finish. With those, I’ve lost perspective. Mostly I’m just glad that I can be done with them.
Everyone has a bizarre childhood and unusual life experiences, whether they know it or not. There’s no such thing as a normal childhood. What’s useful in writing weird fiction is learning how to understand and articulate those moments of personal, particular strangeness.
Becka was almost good looking enough to be on a reality dating show, but not funny looking or sad enough to be on one of the makeover shows.
When I’m up for an award, there are usually two or three other things on the ballot that I like better than my own fiction.
Topiary has always seemed like a good occupation, comparable in some ways to writing short fiction.
It’s very unlikely that a writer is going to make a living by writing. So then the question is: how do you balance work, life, and writing? If you find out, please tell me.
The world is a dangerous place, full of people who don’t trust each other. This is why I am staying up in this tree.
I don’t think I’m cut out for a job where you have to look professionally tidy. I prefer working in my pajamas and taking showers after lunch.
The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed and given to evil habits, or else it can be a man in his late forties who works too much, or it can be an alarm clock.
I don’t abandon stories once I’ve started working on them. Once I sit down and start a story, I’ll be damned if I’m going to give up on it. But I do reject most of the ideas for stories that I come up with.
In terms of style, too, I think I’ve been working with a somewhat limited – although intentionally limited – set of tools. So I’m attempting to be a bit looser as I start stories off. To digress. To make interesting mistakes.
Whether or not this story has a happy ending depends, of course, on who is reading it. Whether you are a wolf or a girl.
The zombies were like Canadians, in that they looked enough like real people at first, to fool you.