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" I try to imagine the scenes as I'm writing them as if I were watching them play like a film. "

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" It was painful, but I really wanted to get 'Hollow City' right, and I'm glad I put in the time because I'm really proud of it. "

" You find a lot of junk when you're searching through lost and tossed photo ephemera, but every so often you'll find a gem, a wallet-sized masterpiece you're certain could hang on the wall of a gallery if only someone with a name had taken it. Find one or two of those and you're hooked for life. "

" The end of 'Hollow City' left the peculiar children in a very precarious spot, and that's just where 'Library of Souls' begins. "

" I loved the 'Chronicles of Narnia.' "

" I write the books to amuse myself. "

" Los Angeles, which is where I live, happens to be a great place for junk. People have a lot of it, and they sell it and trade it: At these big swap meets, many, many hundreds of dealers of junk will descend upon a football field on a Saturday and sell all their stuff. "

" My happy place is 40 feet out in the Gulf of Mexico, sitting on a sandbar in 80-degree water, watching clouds crawl by. Absolute heaven. "

" Creepy is better than just plain scary because you can't look away from creepy - you want to know the truth! "

" The undiscovered places that are interesting to me are these places that contain bits of our disappearing history, like a ghost town. "

" Some days, I would find what seemed like entire family trees, torn from once-treasured albums and dumped in disorganized bins, selling 10 for a dollar. I wondered how people could give up pictures of their great-grandparents for complete strangers to paw through - or why complete strangers would want them. "

" I had some great English teachers. One of my favorite - her name was Linda Janoff - was wonderful and so irreverent and so smart and encouraging. "

" I went to film school, trained as a director, have made a lot of movies, and taken a lot of photographs, so I tend to envision things spatially. As I'm working, I need to have a map of the space. I need to know what's happening in all corners simultaneously. "

" You'll find a lot of rich detail in people's personal histories - diaries and journals and things of the era. "

" I have an unusual hobby: I collect pictures of people I don't know. It started when I was a kid growing up in South Florida, the land of junk stores, garage sales, and flea markets, as a kind of coping mechanism. "

" I think my background in film taught me that a great book adaptation is not always slavishly faithful to the source material. "

" Every snapshot collector has obsessions. Some only collect photos of cars. Others like World War II, or babies, or old-timey girls in old-timey swimsuits. I happen to collect the weird stuff: photos that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up a little. The uncanny. "

" Just the textures of things are really important to me as I'm writing; I think atmospherics and visuals can have such emotional impact if you can harness the thematic thread between how scenes look and how your characters feel. I like to tug on that thread. "

" Fairy tales and folk tales are part of the DNA of all stories and great fun to write. "

" 'Library of Souls' is longer than 'Hollow City' by a considerable margin, but this time I was on the right track from the beginning, so I never had to start over. It took about 15 months, all told. "

" I don't want to ever write a book that seems like it's pandering to younger people or talking down to people who I know are very smart. "

" I wanted to create characters who could do fantastic things but who weren't exactly superheros - characters who exist on sort of a spectrum from super-ability to disability. "

" Woodcuts have a really timeless sort of feel, and they feel like a book that's a couple hundred years old. "

" I think 'Hollow City' only took a year and a half to write... but it felt like two and a half! "

" It was at a big swap meet that I discovered you could buy other people's old discarded family photos and vacation pictures for pretty cheap - a quarter, 50 cents, five bucks for a really nice one. "