“I wanted to be a screenwriter so I moved to LA for a couple of years and lived there. I still want to be a screenwriter but it was just so expensive to live there so I moved here and got this job at Pioneer Book. I’m still writing but it’s really nice to just have a steady job. I’m going to move in a couple months to Vancouver, Canada, to keep doing screenwriting.

I haven’t written anything that’s been produced yet. I like writing sci-fi and comedy. I like writing movies more than TV shows. When I was in LA I was just reading scripts for movies that were coming into the company.

I’ve lived in lots of different places. Living in LA, I had to try really hard to be true to myself. Outside forces pushed me toward things that were not what I saw in myself. I had to be myself in a world that I didn’t recognize myself in.

A lot of the world’s cares I don’t share. Living in LA, status was really important. Who you knew was really important. I don’t care about stuff like that. It was kind of difficult to focus just on what I wanted to do.

I’d been in LA for a while and I was complaining about this to my dad. I told him I wanted to write what I wanted to write and that I didn’t care what was popular. He told me there was something to be said for being a popular writer: they make money. I told him, ‘Yes, but that’s not what I want to do. I don’t really care if it’s popular because I can have other jobs that supply money. I want to write what I want to write.’ Not that it won’t be popular. I hope it will be, but it’s not going to be formulaic like Nicholas Sparks. I have to do what I feel like is true to myself.”