Edan Lepucki Quotes

I recognize that I'm probably the luckiest novelist in recent memory, because Sherman Alexie, a writer I greatly admire, raved about my book on 'The Colbert Report,' and then Mr. Colbert himself urged his viewers to buy it - on his show and on Twitter.

I was interested in writing about gender in this future world where progress has not only halted but turned backward. On another note, sometimes the personal is not so politically correct, and what we are turned on by can't be made to behave.

There is a moment, when a woman's foolishness slips into delusion. The former is forgivable, the latter isn't. You will never live it down. Remember that.

I think that sharpens the intention of a scene and clarifies a story's arc. Of course, I don't seek the questions until after I've written a scene - or maybe after I've daydreamed it.

I did a lot of this through writing flashbacks. Many of the flashbacks took place at Cal's school and I eventually cut them because they didn't seem essential and they slowed the pace of the story in the first third of the book. They were essential to me, though, in that I learned about my characters.

I am always worried that over-planning and outlining will kill the magic of writing; most of the world I created in 'California' occurred via good old sexy sentence-making.

The issue is that my book, and so many others, are not available for pre-order from Amazon. I hadn't realized how much that mattered for new authors. And how much Amazon is hurting us.

How impossible, though, to turn one's back on all the horrors in the world; there had to be another way to live.

Amazon has historically been a bully, and I don't shop there. But I love Goodreads. For the record.

I am not sure I knew what I was doing, writing an "apocalypse" novel, when I started this book. Now that the book is done, I can own that I have in fact written an apocalypse novel, one that speculates on a dark, dark future. Why I did it, I really don't know - every time people read my work they comment on its darkness, its sadness.

Men were stupid to forget what good sleuths women could be.

It's funny: when I set out to create the world of 'California,' I didn't give the type of apocalypse much thought ... I simply set my two characters, Cal and Frida, in a depleted world and moved through it intuitively.

If you don't ponder the end of the world on a regular basis, I don't think you're really human.

For me, even when I was pregnant, I wondered, Should we even have children if we're bringing them into this horrible, scary world? But I did have a child, despite these fears - or because of them - and these fears are both contemporary and as old as time.

With 'California,' editors were reading it, and fast, and others were emailing my agent to request it. Ultimately, there were a few editors interested in the book, and it sold at auction about two weeks after the submission process started. I couldn't believe it!

Have a much harder time writing stories than novels. I need the expansiveness of a novel and the propulsive energy it provides. When I think about scene - and when I teach scene writing - I'm thinking about questions. What questions are raised by a scene? What questions are answered? What questions persist from scene to scene to scene?

I tossed off a mention of the pirates early on. And they became integral to the backstory. Sometimes now I imagine them in the woods. They scare me. All men. Dirty and wearing red.

I imagined swinging from the punching bag of his uvula.

Amazon is such a big player in publishing, but a lot of authors feel this connection to their publishing house and their editors who helped them get their books out there, so their loyalties tend to go that way.

I am glad it's [California novel] resonated with people because, for me, most apocalyptic novels aren't scary, because they feel so very far off.

There's nothing more tragic than a man who gains weight like a woman does.

The messiness [in my books] is nothing like an Atwood novel. For me, the deeper subjects are secrets versus intimacy, and how both beget safety but also threaten it. And there is a lot for me about loss, too.

I'm always looking for complicated characters in fiction about whom I can feel a dozen feelings at once - in the space of a single paragraph, even.

This is what she'd always wanted. A painless life.

Time moved forward, but the mind was restless and stubborn, and it skipped to wherever it pleased, often to the past: backward, always backward.

Oh how I wish I could be as obsessive as Carrie from 'Homeland' when I'm writing a book! That would save me a lot of trouble during the revision process.

I still can't believe that I went on 'The Colbert Report' myself; for the appearance I wore a lot of makeup, my hair was curled like a poodle's, and I could barely breathe in my Spanx undergarments. But, hey - an authoress has to lean in, right?

I'm a mother of a three-year-old, but when I started 'California,' my son wasn't even a twinkle in my eye. Because the book took as long as it did, I wrote it before I was pregnant, while I was pregnant, and as a new mother - so I enjoyed a diversity of experiences while creating this world.

It's a bit scary to see my book come true: the recent (if minor) LA earthquakes, Hurricane Sandy, the Boston bomber, and so on - much of it stoppable, I think, and yet I, too, am also guilty of passivity.

The thing Lady didn't get, or the thing she'd forgotten, was that being a child was painful too. She was so wrapped up in losing Seth, the treacheries of him growing up, that she couldn't remember what it felt like to be on the other side. The burden of that. Sure, Seth had left her womb and never returned, but he was the one who had to do the leaving.