The folks at Flavorwire have a column for debut authors and it’s a little different from what you might expect from me. For example, you get to learn about how I hate Hemingway (seriously–I like to think that I too would have covered the Spanish civil war but there the similarities most definitely end) and what music I listen to when writing.

Excerpt, read the whole thing at Flavorwire:

What’s your approach: writing it all out in one big messy draft and then editing, or perfecting as you go (or something in between)?

Something in between. Teaching myself to write something imperfect and edit it later has been hard, especially since most of my career has been writing for the web with minimal editing. But as I go along I have built relationships with a few great magazine editors and a wonderful book editor whom I trust to really read closely and help me make something better. So I’ve learned to get something on the page and then clean it up, but it still makes me twitch to write something that I don’t love.