I’m good at marketing myself through the columns. But compared to other people I know, as far as networking and pushing yourself out there, I’m not very good at that.

I try to see what that person is thinking or feeling about that particular day. I just get more of a sense of what that person’s like and hopefully it’s more interesting than a normal conversation.

Early on, even in college, I figured out that it was just more interesting to me to create content than to write about other people. So that makes it more marketable.

When I get real big volumes of hate mail, it’s usually because I wrote something poorly. But it’s also because some group told people to e-mail me and those people didn’t read the article, they read the post about what I wrote about. And they all e-mail me. And they all come around at the same time.

What I wound up doing, which I think is really journalistically dubious, is changing the order of some of the things I did, so that the things I ended up struggling with the most wind up being two-thirds of the way in.

I’m not that clued into what people are that touchy about and how many of them there are and how niche these niches are.

When I lose my column again, I’m sure I’ll get hungry again. Maybe it’s having a kid, but it’s probably just getting to do what I always wanted to do – I’m really not that hungry.

When Time got rid of my column, I thought it was all over. It was really sad. And then, I just started pushing it to lots of places. And I thought someone would run my column, I thought it was popular, and no one wanted it.

There have been people who represent something very symbolic and I’ve been freaked out interviewing them.

You really, really have to care about animals to want to kill one. You have to learn all this stuff about them and start thinking like them.