I include some humor in most of my writing. The guy in the back of my head who does the actual creating seems to have a natural sense of how much to use and when to use it. I don’t argue with him because he’s almost always right.

I was riding the city bus, late at night, and I saw a bus stop ad for something I can no longer remember—it wasn’t a good ad—the ad’s mascot was a smiling GPS pin. You know the location pin in Google Maps: a red circle that tapers into a long tail? That, with a smiley face. I remember being revolted. Why does everything need a face? I thought of other ads that personify unlikely things by tacking on a smile—most horrifyingly, the kiwi fruit whose smile is carved from his skin.

I love the Alice books, as well as Carroll’s other work, but like a lot of readers and scholars, I’ve wondered about what actually happened between him and the Liddell family, particularly Alice—and I’ve wondered what it would have been like to be Alice, famous for being the heroine of Carroll’s book. She had a life, by the way—a very rich life apart from being a literary character. But to us, she will always be Alice in Wonderland.

I spent a large chunk of my childhood in Gainesville, Florida, where the local fauna are as much a part of your property as the front door. We had gators in our yard after it rained, an armadillo living under the porch, and a long pile of rocks against one side of the house that sheltered a huge snake. Every so often, we’d find one of its shed skins wedged between the rocks.

Refractin, the cosmetic procedure, was born of a few of my obsessions pooling together—modern art, Vantablack, body modification, and the act of reading people’s nonverbal communication. Oh, and the one illustration of the Terrible Trivium from The Phantom Tollbooth, which scared me so much as a kid I had to skip that chapter.