My creative workday starts with strong breakfast tea and a few minutes of journaling, both of which help me get my head in the story. So much of story-building for me involves immersing myself in the character and situation I'll be working on, just the way an actor does when playing a role.

It's 2010. I'm forty-three years old. I've just turned in the final draft of what will be my third novel when I decide I want a tattoo. Maybe it's a middle-age thing. Or maybe now that my kids are nearly grown and I have a career in place, I'm finally coming into my own.

No writing effort is ever wasted. At the very least, it's practice, and a writer never knows when he or she might usefully cannibalize an earlier effort for something new.

Conventional wisdom tells us to avoid taking unalterable action while at a low point in life. I have never been conventional.

I think for me, as a gay person, I can convince a lot more people to be for gay marriage by not screaming at them and berating them and embarrassing them and belittling them, but by showing them that we're all exactly the same.

There are many things you shouldn't measure. Don't, for example, try to measure how much you love your wife!

The year I married my American husband, I won the lottery - and I tried to give it to somebody else, because I was already approved - not the money lottery, the immigration lottery.

I've always seen 'Y' as an unconventional romance between a boy and his protector. It was always about the last boy on Earth becoming the last man on Earth, and the women who made that possible.