San Francisco is a breathtakingly beautiful city, with lots of great contrasts between dark and light, often overlapping each other. It's a great setting for a horror story.

As much as I encourage communication with my readers, I don't want reviews from them, simply because I don't need to be hamstrung in the middle of working on something.

I've sort of made a reputation by high-stepping my way out of genre. As soon as somebody says, 'He does this,' I'm not standing there anymore.

All of the trickster, rascal characters that I write have the voice I aspire to. In real life, you can't be that obnoxious and get away with it.

I consider myself a disciple of Norman Lear. And one of the things he did was topic-driven humor.

In the 1990s, it's OK to do comedy about the Chernobyl disaster or the Space Shuttle blowing up. It's acceptable to ridicule the Pope or the President of the United States, but God forbid you do a joke... about gays. The gay community is the last sacred cow in this society.

Stewardesses were a joke to many of us coming of age in the liberated Sixties. They were no joke in the women's movement that liberated us, however.

The first joke I ever told on stage was a golf joke.