So This Was What It Felt Like

In Some Ways All Of My Fiction Is Like A Conversation I'm Having With The Writers I Read When I Was First Falling In Love With Books.

Maybe Love, Like Suffering, Is Relative.

Fiction Is Fun Because You Get To Steal An Identity And Try To Make It Authentic.

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 Sort Of Freeing: I Can Say I'm Abandoning This Thing That I Hate Forever And I'm Moving On To Something That's Good. I'll Find That I'll Go Back To [the Other Project] In A Day Or A Week And Like It Again. But That Moment Of Wanting To Trash Something -- That Virginia Woolf Moment When You Have To Be Stopped From Filling Your Pocket With Stones -- Comes Pretty Regularly For Me. Switching Is Probably A Good Thing.

There Is A Stage You Reach, Deagle Thinks, A Time Somewhere In Early Middle Age, When Your Past Ceases To Be About Yourself. Your Connection To Your Former Life Is Like A Dream Or Delirium, And That Person Who You Once Were Is Merely A Fond Acquaintance, Or A Beloved Character From A Storybook. This Is How Memory Becomes Nostalgia. They Are Two Very Different Things - The Same Way That A Person Is Different From A Photograph Of A Person.