At age 4, I demanded of my mother, "Teach me to read." I was an avid consumer of Sesame Street, and my mother had watched me sound out letters and words, so she said, "You already know how to read." I didn't believe her, so we sat down with a book and she helped me (slowly) read it aloud to her. The book was called, "Ann Likes Red." The impact was tremendous. I ran around the house screaming.

I used to "make books" when I was very little by drawing a sequence of pictures, sometimes with some words, and stapling them together. I started doing this when I was 4 or 5. One of the earliest "books" I can remember making featured a hungry shark who ate so many fish that he exploded, replete with an illustration of a cartoony BOOM 50 feet under the ocean. Obviously, I was a little fuzzy on the physics.

You mean seriously? At age 14. I wrote my first novel at the household computer in WordPerfect 5.0. (Ah, the romance of that desolate blue screen! I can still see the little clover-pattern of the "hard return" symbol when I close my eyes.) I fell in love as I wrote, and thought, "This is what I want to be."

My dad was in the US military and we moved around a lot. As a consequence, I never had (and don't have) a sense of being rooted anywhere within the states. This has influenced my writing enormously. In being bonded with nowhere, I'm curious about everywhere, and the diversity of genres, lengths, styles, voices, and worlds that I've written reflects that. But while I don't feel rooted within any place inside America, I do feel rooted in America in general, and that's reflected in my fiction, too. I'm more likely to write a classically western "person wants a thing, person struggles and overcomes obstacles, person gets the thing" type of story than, say, a slice-of-life vignette, a story about community cohesion, or a story wherein what changes is wholly inside the protagonist.

I write on a small, creaky, lovely old wooden dining table that, even with the leaf in, only seats four. I bought it off of Craigslist in 2013 from a woman with financial troubles who extremely didn't want to sell it because it used to be her grandmother's, and she told me several times that she was anxious that it go to a good home. As I am a tidy person who rooms with no pets, children, or other destructive forces, and who tends to get sentimental about objects, I will probably keep and protect this table until I die. So you have nothing to worry about, ma'am.

Whenever I sit down to work, I open a can of something carbonated, raise it up in a toast, close my eyes, and focus on my gratitude—how happy I am to be able to make art—and I whisper, "Thank you." Then I take a sip. Then I make some art.

I guess maybe that wasn't quite what you meant by the question.

I find empty landscapes and still life displays very evocative—of a tone, mood, theme, or setting—and I use these. The common wisdom is that covers with pictures of people sell more books, but since my photography and Photoshop skills (not to mention my "recruit models for photo shoots" skills) are only so-so, I'd rather work with stock images that don't contain humans. My inborn sense of aesthetics keeps me away from any truly awful artistic decisions, and my inborn sense of "if you get totally lost, maybe try mimicking what other people do" allows me to look at other book covers and go, "Hey, that looks nice; maybe I'll try that on mine."

Although I write mostly short fiction, I somehow end up reading very little of it. I gravitate toward (non-epic) fantasy, soft or near-future science fiction, YA/middle grade fantasy, literary fiction, narrative poetry, (auto)biography, manga/graphic novels, and miscellaneous nonfiction. But I'll still read stuff that isn't on that list. I don't consider myself a fan of military SF, romance, mysteries, or horror, for example, but I've still read (and enjoyed) books in those genres.

Sometimes my husband shows me a tweet that he's saved and he goes, "Get this," and then we read that tweet (and all the other tweets in the inevitably following thread) and then marvel at the ill-informed opinions of other people. But that's the closest I come these days. If I don't have enough time to regular-read, then I super don't have enough time to waste on hate-reading.

Oh, sure, just ask me the hardest f***ing question in the world, why dontcha.