I began writing because it offered an escape from everyday life – although in fourth grade (when I undertook my first script for a self-created comic book), I certainly didn’t think of it in those terms; I just knew it felt good to create. I imitated the things I enjoyed as a reader: Marvel comics, Roald Dahl, and as I grew a bit older, Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling and Stephen King. Even as the baggage surrounding writing grew more complex – as my income, and a large part of my identity, became inextricable from what I wrote and how it was received – the basic drive remained, and remains, the urge to escape everyday life; to inhabit a place more romantic, more dangerous, and, crucially, more under my control than reality.

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