I didn’t really want Joshua to come into The Arm of the Starfish. I am as lazy as anybody else. It meant an awful lot of extra work. But Joshua demanded to be in that book. There was no way with any integrity I could refuse to put him in.
I think this can sound sort of woo-wooey and mystical. It isn’t. It is a way that the creative subconscious has of informing the conscious mind. But I also believe that it is more than that. There are creative ideas out there, and we are meant to be finely tuned receivers. Most of the time we’ve lost our ability to receive, and we hear static. But every once in a while we can pick it up. And what the artist does is keep tuning the receiver so that the message comes in more and more clearly. And that’s one reason I do not dominate or manipulate the work any more than I want to dominate or manipulate my friends or my children or my family, because that is destructive, not creative.