For me, writing fiction is a way of bringing shadowy things into the light. Sometimes I like that. Sometimes I don’t. But if there is another way to write, I haven’t found it.

Probably everyone writes like this. Probably it all comes down to personal differences.

My differences have to do with autism and my own particular history. So I understand why my characters turn out the way they turn out—and I have come to accept them.

I know that the characters in my stories will probably be traumatized or codependent or addicted or disconnected, no matter how hard I try for normal. I understand that they may not be likable. I know that it will take an entire book for most of them to make a single, incremental change.

To me, those small changes matter—but that doesn’t always make them easy to spot in my writing. Which is one reason why beta readers and critique partners can be important.

From my perspective these early readers are a little ambassadors from a faraway land. I don’t understand the culture in their country of origin. I don’t know what hope looks like there, or happiness or what passes for courage.

I don’t know if those things are learnable or if they really matter at all—but I do know that I can’t tell the story of a culture that isn’t my own. For me, in fact, the creative process is the exact opposite of that.

I would like to translate my fiction into something people from some other place might understand, however. Which is why I just rewrote the ending of the vampire story. It’s my attempt to make a small incremental change visible.

That small change is the point of the point of the story. It’s not about realizing that love conquers all. It’s about allowing for the possibility that love prevails against some things. Sometimes. And that is as close as I get.

I used to say that I wrote anti-romance, but I’m actually not sure that anti-romance would describe the stories I write today. There is an element of love in the stories I write now—even if ideas about love are essentially cultural, and even if we are all sovereign states.