'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.

If you take my stuff apart, you'll find my choruses of repetitions are picked up almost verbatim from Kurt Vonnegut, and my distanced fracture quality is all from Amy Hempel, who's probably my favourite writer.

Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.

We're so much more likely to feel sympathy for an animal than another person; thus, the best fiction uses animals to define truly humane behavior.

Nobody's told me anything to date that I've been completely reviled by.

My publisher's been shipping me to comic-cons, and it seems that my readership overlaps perfectly with the comic-con crowd.