To Conform Is To Lose

Things Could Be Worse And Things Could Be So Much Better.

The Internet Takes A Lot Of The Anxiety Of Life Away. It's A Kind Of Deity. You're Never Lonely. You're Always Distracted. If You Spend Enough Time On It, There's Not Really That Nagging Sensation Of Existential Despair; It Erases It Very Effectively. And It's Monolithic. And Thanks To It, We've Got The Ways To Linger There After Death - Your Blog Exists Afterwards, Your E-mail Exists Afterwards.

I'm Being Provided With Some Emotional Ballast By Giving Me An Intimate Portrait Of One Character In Particular In Contrast To The Collective. I'm Fortunate That I Had Very Sympathetic Readers, But Ordinarily - If A Book Makes You Laugh Too Much, It Shifts From "literature" To "entertainment."

There Were Times Where I Felt I Was Pressing A Little Bit Too Hard With The Humor, And I Had To Pull Back, Because The Overriding Concern Of The Book Was To Create This Disease That Had No Cure And Make You Pay Attention To Every Emotional Stage Of What Happens.

The Thing Is, For Me, As A Fiction Writer, I Don't Think There's A Finer Testament To Our Lives Than This Thing That's Being Spurned - The Emotional Intelligence, The Ethics, The Beauty. It's All There. It's All So Fully Contained In A Novel That Succeeds. But At The Same Time, I Understand The Impulse To Put Away Childish Things.