Something I haven't said in at least 6 weeks..."This is so bad it's gone past good and back to bad again."

Whenever I think about back when I lived in NYC I feel likeat the time I didn't realize how crazy it was. Now when I look at it as a picture I say, those were some strange times.

Sometimes when you write it feels like it's not going to happen, like you're scraping the bottom of the bottle even if you have a complete and total idea of where you want everything to go, and like there's nothing there. And the new book does get complex. I was thinking about that today in the grocery store like, I love it but how did it all of a sudden get so twisty? And I was actually impressed that I was keeping some of it in my head and not messing it up. I think people will like it. I feel more in control of it than I did with my first book. That one felt like it was writing me instead of vice versa. So it works on a lot of different levels. But agents tell me people don't want that kind of thing anymore. I just choose to ignore them. You can always tell I'm having a good time in my writing whether the story is a valentine or a poison arrow, it's always fun, crazy, and saying something in a multiple rubiks cube kind of way. Creepiness and grace. And I have to just keep redefining to myself with every story or book, exactly how much of each I want to use to make something new and different.

I'm a weirdly nostalgic person- I find it hard to only look forward; I always look back. The guy who inspired a character in my first book said I had a tendency to live in the past but anyone who read that book knows he wasn't exactly a Rhodes scholar when it came to social sciences so he cares what he thought even if he had a point. It's a little like clinging onto a wonderful raft- you start on a big ship and end up clinging to this wonderful raft and frankly, I like the raft.

Nothing beats Kansas. It's where I've always wanted to be- that land of wide open spaces. It seems like I always want to go to places that nothing can beat heading to places that most people can't wait to leave. I just want to get lost in Kansas where there's fields left and right and teeny roads. It's so exciting- you have no idea what could come out or what could happen or what characters are brewing around and there's just so much old-school America out there. Even when nothing much is happening I'm just ecstatic.