'Ant King' Author Keeps It Surreal

After 30-odd published stories, do you detect any fan base?

Yeah, but there's also a writing community. There's a lot of people that are fans of my work, and I'm a fan of their work. That's one of the unexpected benefits of being a writer. . . . If I could go back and tell my 18-year-old self, who was suffering from this romantic notion of the destiny of a writer -- this idea that you have something to say that is internal to you, something inborn, and it has to come out on the page, and any revision is a concession -- all that is really, I don't want to say it's crap, but it's not really the business of the work of art. Rather than that life, which I imagine is doomed and lonely, the writing life that I have is intensely communal.

Do you just have a rich imagination, or do you look for elements of reality to exaggerate or project into the future?

I think both. I was a very weird kid in elementary school, and I was very much sort of an outsider and really living in my imagination. That stays with me. Part of learning to write is realizing the ideas do not come when you sit down at the page and say, "Now I'm going to have an idea." They usually come in the shower or while driving, and what's important is to allow yourself to capture those and elaborate on them.

If you had to project your writing career into the future, toward "the destiny of a writer" you mentioned, and toward perhaps attaining greatness, where do you see it going beyond "The Ant King"?

In some ways, I feel like it's all gravy at this point. If the project was to start to satisfy this 15-year-old I hadn't given up on, I'm done. In another sense, I'm ambitious. If I'm going to spend all this effort, the game is being known in 200 years. I want this stuff to last forever. On the one hand, I'm fine. On the other hand, the sky's the limit.

Any earned wisdom you can share with other writers, especially since you've plotted the submission-and-rejection process so methodically?

There's a theory in the stock market about unemotional investing. You should devise a system which will distance you from your own emotional reactions. I think a lot of people do have emotional reactions to rejection. They get psyched out, and it's hard to understand it's so arbitrary and huge and random. Something one person rejects, another will love. It was very useful to have a system. When the story comes back, you already have the envelope to go to the next place.