No, but sometimes I don’t find the right song, so I need to go to sleep and find the song the next day. But I have so much music, that if I need inspiration, I just push play and there’s always a song waiting for me.

Keep you uncorked, keep you unstuck, keep it flowing, keep the ideas going, keep the feedback, keep you in communication with your potential future customers for the book. I think it's a great idea.

I get really mad, and I’m like, “Well, I have to solve it.” I think of these things sometimes even as math problems. I take a photo of it, I turn it away, and I look at it in my phone a lot. An image becomes much less scary to solve when it’s not eight feet tall, but it’s eight centimeters tall. When I’m going to bed, I’m obsessively in the finger drawing app on my phone, and I try and figure out what to do with it. Eventually, I’ll figure out the answer, and then turn the painting back around and fix it, but it’s way harder to do when you’re just staring at the giant thing.

I think there’s two different things. There’s creative block and then there’s being busy. Sometimes they’re happening at the same time. You could be busy with a lot of concerts, improvised work, or collaborations and still have the creative block. There’s a point, though, where it’s like why keeping so busy becomes a question. Is it just about convincing yourself that you are constantly creative? Then, the question becomes maybe those ideas are not going to be as interesting as something I can come up with if I sat in the mountains for six months trying to write something by myself, you know?

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

As many times as necessary. With one story or novel, this may be five false starts and six or eight or ten full rewrites, beginning to end. With the next, it may mean just going back through it and over it fiddling details until I think it’s as good as I can get it.

Because, yeah, I am afraid of madness. It’s scary.

That's it. Mostly. Really, the people and the issues all come together in a sort of clump or knot, and writing the story is untying, unwinding the knot.

If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin—the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin’s thinking. And he felt it, too.

But I will be horrified by the way I say kind of and like, and I keep qualifying everything. That’s very feminine. I would like to say it plain, but it always comes out with all these silly qualifiers.