It's always the same - all men and women want to be sexy.
The appeal of writing a romance was that I'd never written one before the The Thorn and The Blossom.
Now that The Thorn and the Blossom has come out and I'm done with my doctoral degree (yes, I'm finally Dr. Goss), I'm turning to longer projects.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote a poem when he was in his 80s about one day writing the book that would justify him. This was long after he had become one of the great masters, a writer everyone looks up to and reveres. As artists, I don't think we ever see ourselves as done. We always think we're at the beginning. . .
Art inspires me. Looking at art in a museum, listening to music, reading the works of other writers.
So much work went into this book [ "The Thorn & The Blossom"] - you can probably tell from looking at the art and overall design.
When we tell stories about things that are important - love, fear, beauty - we change the way people think about the world. Writers are, or should be, truth-tellers even when the stories themselves are fantasy.
I have sometimes been haunted with the idea that it was an imperative duty, knowing what I know, and having seen what I have seen, to do all that lies in my power to show the dangers and the evils of this frightful institution.
Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.
I'd rather hang out with five people that I love than with 400 strangers at a club who are all doing the up-and-down inspection thing. They appraise everybody from head to toe - the outfit, the handbag, the shoes, how much they weigh. . . I can't stand it!
A long time ago, I stopped trying to look at projects as genre exercises.