reporter things, where you can’t believe you’ve had such good luck to be able to do this crazy thing. We were out there all night armed – well, they were armed – kind of like a keg party without the beer, and I was thinking, “Oh, this is so much fun.” And I had given myself a little free pass to go to Marta, which is this pretty cool little town, and to stay in a nice hotel. So I had gotten in about three in the morning and there was an email from my wife, and is said basically, “Call me! Call me! Call me! Call me! Call me!” And the next email was from the MacArthur, saying, “Could you please contact us at your earliest convenience.” And it was too late to do anything, so I went to bed and had all these crazy dreams about a nun saying, “You think you won a MacArthur?” [Laughter] “You’re in for a take-down, mister!” Anyway, the point is that it was really incredible, but it didn’t sink in at the time, because there was still a lot of work to do on the trip. So then I got home and...it’s kind of difficult to talk about, but it’s just really gratifying, to be thought so well of. And also, our kid had just started college, and we hadn’t put much of anything away, so just...gratitude. And also, psychologically, just that feeling to have the financial bar raised, the ceiling raised, and to be able to stand up straighter. That had a weird effect on my work. I was standing a little more. I don’t know if it was that things got a little more expansive, or that I was a little more open to.... It’s weird to think that increased money would make you a more generous writer, but it kind of did. I remember silly things, like going into a store and not flinching quite as much when you paid for something. It’s weird how those things are actually pretty deep, especially for people who have been working all their lives and feeling those pressures. It was profound to be recused from that stuff a little bit. And also, the Lamborghini was super. [Laughter] Let’s talk about the new book, Tenth of December. It literally came out today. But let’s work up to it a little bit, by first saying that you’re mostly known as a short-story writer. You don’t have any full-length stories out besides the novella, right? Yeah, every novel I’ve started has kind of shrink-wrapped itself. [Laughter] So not yet. And I’ve been having this really sort of intense cram session with your work in the last couple of weeks, and I was very tickled as I was reading through it to think of the idea that you have built this little sort of “DC Universe” for yourself. This sort of shared universe where all your stories take place, but this very twisted, dark shared universe. Do you ever think that way yourself when you’re looking at your body of work? Do you think, “All these stories take place in this theoretical United States that I thought up, where there’s these shared rules from story to story?” No, I never do. The thing I mentioned earlier, where I had my first breakthrough, the breakthrough was: I’m aware that all of this is personal. For a long time I thought of writing as something you intended to do, and then did. The basic dynamic is, “I have an idea, so sit there and take it.” But I could never get anything done in that
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