My favorite game was one I invented with my cousins called Mean Aunt Rosie, where I was a deranged maiden aunt who chased them around the house.

I was not a nice little girl. My favorite summertime hobby was stunning ants and feeding them to spiders.

I grew up in the '80s where there's a lot of these kind of post-apocalyptic, post-comet, post-whatever it was, so that always captured my imagination a lot as a little kid, that idea of getting access to secret places and being able to roam around where you're not supposed to.

Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.

I always loved ghost stories and haunted house stories, whether they were done in a fantasy way or done in a realistic way.

I have four or five ideas that just keep floating around and I want to kind of just let one - like a beautiful butterfly, let it land somewhere.