“Yeti.”

“I see.”)

“GOLIATH”

“They want you to write a story,” said my agent, some years ago. “It’s to go on the Web site of a film that hasn’t come out yet, called The Matrix. They’re sending you a script.” I read the film script with interest, and wrote this story, which went up onto the Web a week or so before the film came out, and is still there.

“PAGES FROM A JOURNAL FOUND IN A SHOEBOX LEFT IN A GREYHOUND BUS SOMEWHERE BETWEEN TULSA, OKLAHOMA, AND LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY”

This was written for my friend Tori Amos’s Scarlet’s Walk tour book, several years ago, and it made me extremely happy when it was picked up for a “best-of-the-year” anthology. It’s a story inspired very loosely by the music of Scarlet’s Walk. I wanted to write something about identity and travel and America, like a tiny companion piece to American Gods, in which everything, including any kind of resolution, hovered just out of reach.

“HOW TO TALK TO GIRLS AT PARTIES”

The process of writing a story fascinates me as much as the outcome. This one, for example, began life as two different (failed) attempts to write an account of a tourist holiday on Earth, intended for Australian critic and editor Jonathan Strahan’s upcoming anthology The Starry Rift. (The story is not in there. This is the first time it’s appeared in print. I’m going to write another story for Jonathan’s book instead, I hope.) The tale I had in mind wasn’t working; I just had a couple of fragments that didn’t go anywhere. I was doomed and had started sending e-mails to Jonathan telling him that there wasn’t going to be a story, at least, not one from me. He wrote back telling me he’d just got an excellent story in from an author I admired, and she wrote it in twenty-four hours.