I see lots of things in my life that contributes to my writing today, and my childhood or teenage efforts at writing are only part of that. I've drawn for longer than I've written, I'd say. I guess in one way I started writing fiction because that was more acceptable for a boy to do than playing with dolls. But I still think of it in the same way, sort of.
Fiction writing is an advanced and mediated form of playing with dolls.
Briefly Told Lives is your first published book. I'm interested in why people are happy, or not. Why they can be happy even if they don't permit themselves to see the truth of their lives, or why, in other cases, people choose to suffer even though they understand what they need to do to help themselves. This juxtaposition is central to what I'm doing. Your stories are often about people who haven't been written about too much in conventional literary fiction, gay fiction especially, but your writing style, as well, is somewhat unusual.