My mother always made me do ball-handling and all that because she was like, 'What if you stop growing?'

I grew up in Flint, Michigan so I'm used to broken promises so I don't look forward to anything. I look forward to the now. I don't even like planning trips more than a week ahead because you don't know how you're going to feel a week from now.

My career was dwindling down and I got to be in Golden State for two years and show I still have it.

I feel like in the course of my career, I've been in the iPhone era and the dilution of the big man.

I'd gotten the message in my home, starting with my grandfather, that real work, the kind that makes you sweat and gets your hands dirty, is a respectable, necessary thing. But I wanted to write - and writing didn't qualify. Whenever I told my parents I dreamed of becoming a writer, they said, 'Great, but what are you going to do for work?'

Now, I'm a failed political consultant. But sometimes fiction has a way of capturing people's imagination in a way that non-fiction doesn't. Conservatives typically haven't written much fiction - specifically political thrillers - over the years to educate, inspire and mobilize people on issues of great import, but we ought to.

I am a woman, and I am Jewish; I'm a film-maker, and I'm a writer, so you cannot just put me in one box.

I started writing probably around when I was 15, because that's when I picked up the guitar. That was also around the same time when I began to create my own music, and everything really just clicked for me, and I knew this was what I was going to do.