15 Things You Don't Know About Me

After Joel Friedlander at The Book Designer:

The Book of Elizabeth is the first novel I have published.

I did it all by myself.  Proudly.

It is not the first book I have written (it's the fifth).

None of the five novels (and the sixth one I'm working on now)feature a main character that is male.

I spent a summer in Dublin, Ireland, at Trinity College with the Irish Writing Program.  We talked a lot about male/female POV and a person's 'default setting.'  I think I said one time men are boring to me.  What more can you say about the male perspective that hasn't been said?  I overstated it, I think.  What might women say of the male perspective?

I get emails all the time from people who think I'm a woman. 

What is it about sexually ambiguous women?  This has nothing to do with writing.  Well.  Yes, it does.

Right now, I'm listening to the new Florence and the Machine record.  A pattern emerges.

The only patterns in your writing you should be conscious of are the ones that are improving.  I graduated from the University of Iowa with a first rate education and a first class confusion of the soul.  I spent years after college trying to reconcile the literary novelist with the Star Wars nerd.  Many of your peers will attempt to 'solve' or 'diagnose' you in workshops.  They're scientists, not writers.  You are person of faith - you yearn to communicate something to the world you can't quantify or explain - living in a world of science. 

There's always things like spaceships and aliens and time travel in my stories.  Not exactly hard science, but have faith.

I'm not particularly religious, but almost everything I write deals with faith to some degree.

My grandfathers, father, and uncle all served their country so I could sit here and ponder things better men asked as only as they died.

I'm only a veteran of bad decisions.

I didn't start watching Community until season 2.

Most everything I learned about writing growing up, I learned from TV.

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