Sex Is A Good Starting Point For

As With Most Of My Work, I Started From The Abstract, From Research, Building An Intellectual Model That Slowly Became Internalized When The Characters Came Alive. It's Fascinating What Happens To The Model You've So Assiduously Assembled When Characters Are Allowed To Run Rampant: Things You Thought Essential Are Broken And Other Things Are Vastly Improved.

The Triumph Of Writing Fiction Is That By Doing So, Writers Can Build A More Ideal World In Themselves.

There Is Part Of Me That Longs To Have The Back-to-the-earth Life - Make My Own Bread, Grow My Own Wheat, Just Be Really Self-sufficient - But I Am Not, At The Moment, Willing To Give Up The Luxury Of Modern Life, And Amazing Schools For My Kids, And Things That I've Come To Rely On That Are Parts Of Society.

Research Is About Following The Gleam Into The Dark. It's Also About Being Sensitive Enough To Know Which Fact Is "the Creative Fact; The Fertile Fact; The Fact That Suggests And Engenders," As Opposed To The Fact That Deadens And Kills A Delicate New Project.

If You Look At Communal Experiments In General For Any Amount Of Time, You'll Find A Lot Of Horrors: Raped Children, Sexual Slavery, Eugenics Experiments, On And On.