Excerpts from the interviews:

“I've been selling stories since right after I graduated from college. I also wrote four novels I couldn't sell, including one I spent over three years on, and a ton of stories nobody wanted (some because they were godawful). I wrote a lot of mainstream stories and never really got excited by them, though I think they were technically good. I sold a couple of them (more got turned down), but they never really came to life. Only one of those early stories was any good. It was a complete fantasy called 'Pop Art', about a friendship between a normal boy and an inflatable kid, and I had so much fun writing it!”

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“'20th-Century Ghost,' which I wrote a few years later, was a turning point for me. I was excited about that story and wanted to write more things like it, so a bunch of stories in the collection came together in the year or so that followed. When I started to experiment more with stories that were surreal and fantastic, I felt more excited, involved, and morally invested. It's a good thing to let your freak flag fly, to follow your instincts and write what you want, not what you think other people would like.”

*

“Eventually my agent and I put the collection 20th-Century Ghosts together, and sent it around. It was turned down everywhere. Peter Crowther at PS Publishing was the last person to look at it. He read the first three stories and got very excited, said 'Let me see the rest,' and then went ahead with it. That's why it came out in England –- no American publisher would have it. A lot of my short stories in America were published in literary journals, but in England most originally appeared in genre magazines like The Third Alternative. But they were all the same kind of weird fantasy tales, no matter where they were published.”

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“A lot of people in my stories are unhappy. Unhappy people are just more interesting to write about than happy ones. I like to write about people who are sort of bad -- they make poor moral decisions, don't treat their friends well, and they're dishonest with themselves. If you can get the reader to care about a character like that, one who's morally flawed, you've got a soul you're rooting for, so you're that much more involved. You're invested in that person trying to pull himself out of the hole he's dug for himself. Many stories are about bad people trying to struggle their way back toward goodness.”

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“I've written a novel called Heart-Shaped Box and sold it to William Morrow. It's about a heavy-metal musician who's had a long, successful career in pop culture. He's one of those guys you keep expecting to disappear, and then he reinvents himself, but now he's in his 50s and he is on the downward slope. He's also (like a lot of my characters) in a state of moral decline, since he's driven away just about everyone who ever cared about him, and the few people who've stuck around he treats very badly. In the middle of searching for a direction, not sure what to do with himself, he hears about this woman selling a ghost online. Without even really thinking about it, he decides to buy it. So he does, and the story is about what happens after UPS delivers it.”