Reporting provides reminders that things are always more complicated than you think.

Freaky things happen all the time in the world. I suppose everything has to happen for the first time at some point.

My family barbecued a lot; good barbecue is more complicated than you think.

Sounding frank, honest, and sincere is, of course, a rhetorical strategy in itself, known from ancient literature as parrhesia. It’s often employed by liars.

The initial research will be very indiscriminate. I do a lot of reading, buy a stack of books and read and digest them, and then I start doing phone interviews and archival research and then the travelling.

I'm a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process. It isn't just tweaking: I tend to break it apart and remake it every time I do a new draft.