GeneralBattuta

You line your prose with very precise, tiled sensory images. What's your process for building one image - opening your nearest book to a random page, 'the candles of his eyes dripped tears of tallow'. Do you pre-create images and fit them in as you work, drawing from a notepad or pool? Is writing an image totally spontaneous - 'I'm here, okay, that works, move on' - or do you tend to stop and ponder? How often in your day to day life do you stop and say 'wow, this textile or scent or spice would fit so well?'

I suspect this might be one of those 'all of the above' questions, especially because this kind of micro-level process is so hard to articulate.

What do you think of semicolons, plain ol' colons, and dashes in sentence structure? How consciously do you plan out the scansion of your sentences and the rhythm your sentence structures across a page? It's always seemed to me that you execute style really well on this level, but I don't know if it's intuitive or deliberative for you.

Hey Cat! You're a huge inspiration and prose master. Can you talk a little about the way you deploy politics in your work? Mythology has always been political, a way to create narratives - how do you want to bend and subvert that?