[on his writing career] To pay the rent, I've written everything you can think of: stories, novels, long-form non-fiction pieces, memoirish stuff, 300-word front-of-book material about wristwatches and water bottles and juicers for a variety of publications, classified ads, ad copy, fake profiles for a dating site. It's been varied. And, in the course of trying to make my living that way, I've often run short on rent money, and thus set up shop as a librarian, an ESL teacher, special-needs bus driver, newspaper and magazine editor, pharmaceutical test subject..and whatever else I could do to make ends meet.