Diana Cage

Diana Cage is a writer and performing artist whose work explores sex, art, bodies, relationships, and desire. Diana came of age in San Francisco during the 1990s and began her career writing for On Our Backs magazine, the first women-run erotica magazine featuring lesbian erotica for a lesbian audience in the United States [published from 1984 to 2006]. Diana is the author of books such as Lesbian Sex Bible: The New Guide to Sexual Love for Same-Sex Couples [2014] and Box Lunch: The Layperson's Guide to Cunnilingus [2004] among many others. From her writing to her work on the radio and in performance art, Diana has created and held safe space for sexual exploration and empowerment for queer, lesbian and trans individuals. The following conversation was recorded on February 23rd, 2019 at 2pm by phone from Brooklyn, NY to California.

Image courtesy of Diana Cage.

Gwen Shockey: The first question I always ask in these interviews is for you to recall the first space you were ever in that was predominantly queer or lesbian occupied, whether a bar, or a community center, or another type of space, and what it felt like to be there?

Diana Cage: It’s complicated! The first primarily lesbian space I went to was a Phranc show in San Diego! I wasn’t even a lesbian yet. The first lesbian/queer bar where I spent any significant amount of time would have been in San Francisco around 1991, at a bar called Café San Marcos. It was on the corner of Castro and Market. It later became more of a mixed gay bar but in 1991 it was primarily a lesbian space. It was like everything you ever imagined a lesbian bar could be. The dance floor was super crowded, and everyone was half-naked and making out. It was the time. It was really sexual. The bartender poured strong drinks, like it was her goal to get everyone hooking up. The dance floor would get very crowded and hot and people would start taking off their shirts, like it was no big deal. That’s what we did, danced in giant, sweaty groups with our tits out. This was pre-Lexington. The Lexington was a regular hangout for me. (Laughing) And then subsequently Meow Mix and then Cattyshack in Brooklyn. 

GS: How old were you when you first went to that space? 

DC: I was twenty-one. I wasn’t even officially gay yet! I still had a boyfriend and we’d been together since we were eighteen and we ultimately stayed together for ten years after that. He was out of town for a month (laughs) and we lived by Café San Marcos, so I started spending nights hanging out there. Everyone was wild, naked, sweaty dancing. When he came back a couple of weeks later, I was like: I guess I’m a lesbian? 

GS: Oh my god! Wow! That didn’t take long! (Laughing)

DC: (Laughs) Everybody had always had their suspicions. He said, “Well, I think everyone knows you’re queer but you like me and I like you. You’re not saying you want to break up with me, and you don’t love somebody else so maybe it’s ok?” The truth is that made sense. It didn’t feel like it had to be that big of a deal at the time. We were in San Francisco and you could be whatever you want.

GS: So this was the early ‘90s?

DC: Yeah, this would have been 1992.

GS: Did you grow up in California?

DC: I did, uh huh. I moved to New York in 2005 and lived there until 2018. I just moved back to California two years ago.

GS: Gotcha. Did you come from an open and liberal background where it was ok to identify as lesbian or queer or fluid?

DC: I started understanding myself as queer right after high school, but I mostly joked around about it. I didn’t come right out and tell everyone. Part of that might also have been that I wasn’t a hundred percent sure. I liked women but I was also just sexually curious in general. There was still a lot of stigma, especially in Southern California where I was from, but when I moved to San Francisco it felt very different. It was practically de rigueur to be queer. The funny thing is, the first adult queer woman I ever kissed was Susie Bright. I must have been twenty-one years old? I mean, I had to be old enough to get into a bar. I was interning for a magazine called Future Sex and we had a launch party and Susie Bright was there and I had been like crushing on her and had read Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World and all that stuff and I walked up to her and said: I love you! And she kissed me, and I remember this so distinctly (laughing) because for a twenty-one-year-old it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. I was like: Wow! I just kissed Susie Sexpert! (Laughing) 

GS: Wow that’s so wild. Did you feel like the first queer community you found was in the club or in the bar?

DC: Bars and clubs were not necessarily my source of community but were definitely my first source of queer sex and oh gosh, even just understanding queer genders. In my later twenties I was at San Francisco State University and took classes in lesbian literature and formed a more intellectual connection to queer culture but in the early days, bars were where all the fun happened. Then the Lexington opened in 1997 and I was in it almost every night like everybody else. The Lexington really felt like a sort of focal point for dyke life in San Francisco during that time. 

GS: What about it really stood out for you – was it mostly that it was just women?

DC: The Lex wasn’t just women, though. It was super dykey for sure, but there were many trans and cis men hanging out with their dyke friends. Many of the other clubs didn’t seem as queer to me. There wasn’t as much of an array of genders. Some of the other clubs had a kind of long hair, makeup, almost Southern California vibe to them, but then the Lexington opened, and it brought all the genders to the yard.

GS: It’s amazing that a space that is sort of a “lesbian” bar can mean everything you know? Even more so than maybe a “queer” bar. That it can be so inclusive.

DC: Oh absolutely! Yeah! Mhmm. It did feel like a very inclusive space in a way that other bars did not. My friends and the people that I dated at that time were a wide array of genders and identities.

GS: That’s amazing. I was never able to go there. I wish I could have.

DC: Oh god yeah it was awesome. It could be little bit of a scene, but it was fun.

GS: You mentioned you were studying lesbian literature and everything at college – did you start to find community through academia as well?

DC: I did. I was in a creative writing program and I was lucky enough to be part of a scene that felt very queer. In the summers I took writing workshops with Dodie Bellamy and Camille Roy, these amazing New Narrative writers. There was this wonderful, storied scene around New Narrative and queer literature in San Francisco, and I guess that is where I found community in the beginning. One of my roommates was queer and that helped as well. Finding queer community in school is relatively easy, but the Lexington was where you found queer sex.

GS: I’ve talked about this with friends and stuff but when I first moved to New York in the early 2000s there were so many hookups happening in lesbian bars and in bathrooms and I feel like that’s not happening anymore or maybe I’m just not aware of it because of dating apps and everything. Was there a lot of public sex happening at the Lexington at that time?

DC: Oh god, yeah, I feel like it’s almost a joke. I mean we even did a photoshoot for On Our Backs of sex in the Lexington bathroom. Having sex in the Lexington bathroom was a cliché but it was also very common.

GS: One of my favorite photographs of all time is in that book Nothing But the Girl: The Blatant Lesbian Image edited by Susie Bright and Jill Posener. It might actually be the photograph you’re describing! 

DC: Yeah that was amazing. That book is beautiful. The early ‘90s was really fun!

GS: What year did you move to New York again?

DC: 2005.

GS: And what brought you to New York?

DC: I got a job as a radio talk show host on Sirius XM. When I was at On Our Backs, I was a reoccurring guest on Sirius XM, and they wanted to start a lesbian-run show so I moved to New York to host a show.

GS: I guess before I even ask you about New York would you mind talking a little bit about how you started writing about sex and relationships in the first place?

DC: Sure! So let’s see… Creative writing, college… Oh, you know what it was, really? It was the job at On Our Backs. First, I had gotten this weird job writing for a porn site. I would watch these little clips of porn and write a really brief summary to make a searchable database of porn clips. I was insanely good at it because I was paid by the summary and I could write them really fast which made it pretty high paying. I couldn’t do it for that long because you can’t actually watch porn for that many hours a day. Seriously. I would go home and have weird anxiety dreams. It was a great job because it paid well but it was just taking a toll on my sanity. (Laughing) So when I left the porn database job, I got a job at On Our Backs. I had an aptitude for writing about sex. It came very easily to me. Tristan Taormino was the editor at that time and she hired me to be assistant editor. I just slipped into that job quite easily from the porn writing job. I mean it sort of makes sense, right? 

GS: How long had the magazine been around before you joined?

DC: The magazine started in 1984 and I started working there in 2000.

GS: What did it feel like to come into an environment like that? I know the title is a sort of result of Off Our Backs following a very different time for feminists and the Feminist Porn Wars in the 1970s and 1980s. Was there much discussion of this then?

DC: By 2000 some stuff from the 1980s and 1990s had worked itself out though there was still a lot of disagreement around what constituted “lesbian sex.” The Letters to the Editor page was where a lot of the debates still played out. Even though it was 2000 and the OOB crowd at least had moved past anti-porn debates, there were still a lot of debates around dildos. Eventually Tristan left the magazine and I became the editor but even as Assistant Editor, I’d be fishing through letters to publish there were so many complaints. It was like, too many dildos! Not enough dildos! Too many butches! Not enough butches! Lesbians would freak out. Everyone thought that the magazine needed to reflect exactly what they believed looked like lesbian sex. There were a lot of earnest debates around the dildo thing. Women would definitely write in complaining that there were too many dildos in the magazine. As if there could be too many dildos anywhere.

GS: How did you work around that?

DC: We really tried to consciously mix it up! When I was editor, we had three distinct photo spreads and we tried to mix it up so that we were representing an array of genders and an array of sexual styles. For some reason, maybe it’s because we were in San Francisco, using cocks and fisting was what we were doing, so that’s what we were putting in the magazine. But we would still get letters complaining.

GS: I think that’s just fascinating. In the ‘90s I suppose the term “lesbian” is still what you would have used but as the 2000s rolled around did you feel like you needed to play with language more – using queer more or more inclusive language?

DC: Representing queer identities and labels was a kind of a struggle at On Our Backs. The publisher of the magazine had some very distinct ideas about what constituted appropriate lesbian sexuality. Many trans women posed for On Our Backs and that was lovely but putting trans men in the magazine got us a lot of push back from the publisher. This seems ironic considering there’s a history of trans women being excluded from lesbian spaces. I consciously fought to make that space – a space for queer sex and sexualities. Even though On Our Backs was located in San Francisco, Tristan Taormino lived in New York and at least half if not more of the models, writers and photographers were in New York, so it really represented the New York queer community as much as SF, if not more. I remember one photo shoot of two hot trans guys dressed in cowboy gear doing a glory hole cocksucking scene. It was very sexy! We just figured, it doesn’t matter if they’re lesbians or not lesbians, we’re lesbians and we want to look at this!

GS: So you were thinking about it more in terms of the lesbian gaze versus fully lesbian content?

DC: We were really queer. I just tried to make it as queer as possible. I was like, well what is lesbian sex? Lesbian sex is whatever sex we’re all having! 

GS: I’m assuming that being involved with On Our Backs, you were also involved in a really sex-positive queer culture and scene in San Francisco at that time? Some of the first lesbian photographs I ever saw were of Catherine Opie’s community there. What was your experience like?

Annie Sprinkle’s Fiftieth Birthday Party. Image Courtesy of Diana Cage.

DC: Well, I was at OOB in the early 2000s, and the culture at that time was a little bit different from the ‘90s. Or at least the culture I was immersed in. I felt very free and sexy in the ‘90s and then suddenly in the early 2000s there were tv shows like HBO’s Real Sex, and magazines and films suddenly paid attention to queer sexualities and I swear this changed the way we viewed our own sexuality. There was a definite shift toward performative public sex. I remember HBO’s Real Sex came to SF to film a queer sex party involving a room full of fucking machines. It seemed really exciting at the time but now seems excessive. Sex parties during that time were great overall. One of the kink/leather sex clubs, The Power Exchange, had a women’s night on Wednesday night called Wet Wednesdays and we went to it the same way you would go to any other club. We would get dressed up for it! It was like a lesbian social hang out place as much as it was a sex club. There were sex parties almost every night. But even regular parties would often turn into sex parties. I remember one time at the end of a friend’s house party, all the gay men stayed and cleaned up the house while a group of dykes took over a bedroom and started having an orgy. I have this clear, delightful memory of a party, I think it might have been Annie Sprinkle’s fiftieth birthday? The picture of me licking someone’s shoe, that was at Annie Sprinkle’s birthday party. I guess the parties all turn into orgies when everyone you are friends with works in sexual culture in some capacity. Someone was always having their birthday party in a dungeon. Of course, it was in a dungeon. Why wouldn’t it be?

GS: Were you still living in San Francisco when it sort of tapered off in a sense? I know there’s still a bit of a scene like that, but it changed a lot didn’t it?

DC: I didn’t notice a big shift in San Francisco before I left but when I got to New York I was really surprised that the scene wasn’t as public and organized. I had been to Submit and to whatever Submit was called before Submit, and I’d gone to a lot of the sex parties in New York, but when I first moved there I went to some Lesbian Sex Mafia events because the leather community was my community in San Francisco and I assumed it would be my community in New York as well, but it didn’t have the same vibe as San Francisco. It seems surprising because New York has everything, but I didn’t find the same free, open, sex everywhere vibe. I thought New Yorkers were uptight! Of course, then I lived there for fifteen years and changed my mind. But at first I really thought that. 

GS: Was it hard for you to find a community because of that?

DC: That’s a good question! A lot of the people I knew in San Francisco moved out to Brooklyn the same time I did so I had some built-in community. I met Grace Moon right away and she hired me as editor of Velvetpark magazine, so the two of us created community together through the magazine. Then of course I was on the radio, though in retrospect, that didn’t really help me with community, in fact it was sort of the antithesis of that because I was on the radio every fucking night when people would be hanging out.

GS: One more question about On Our Backs and then I want to ask you about the radio show: so you weren’t involved with On Our Backs when it was first conceived of but what is your sense of how it changed when you look back through the archives from the late 1980s to the early 2000s in terms of the sex content and the handling of lesbian sexuality?

DC: I think in the ‘80s and ‘90s the magazine was still reacting to the feminist sex wars so the content felt defiant in the sense that the editors were publishing it for a specific reason, to push back against a restrictive, repressed culture. They were like, “We’re doing this because everyone says we’re not sexual or this type of sexuality isn’t lesbian or it’s not feminist.” The magazine was celebrating lesbian sexual culture but it was also pushing back against a lesbian culture that believed there was only one way to have lesbian sex.  By the time the 2000s rolled around we were finally steeping in this very horny, very queer, very sex-positive culture and we weren’t reacting to things as much as we were enjoying the progress that the ‘90s had given us.

GS: I love that… steeping in it. It’s interesting to think about how practices and ideas of “lesbian” sex has changed decade to decade. It’s so cool to have the archive of On Our Backs and to be able to see this reflection of those changes.

DC: It’s so true, right? I mean that magazine lasted twenty years – it’s amazing! If you look back at all twenty years of the magazine you can see this, I wouldn’t even say evolution – because it wasn’t that it evolved –  it’s just that it kept changing with the styles and times and going through all these different phases and you can look at twenty years of lesbian sex. It’s just amazing.

GS: How was it possible that it even lasted that long? Do you know what I mean? Was there just a super high demand for it? Because that is just a really long lifespan for something that is a little edgy like that.

DC: I think it lasted because it was the only thing like it. People would subscribe just to have it lying around. It said something about what kind of dyke you were. Also, the magazine was published very cheaply. I think a lot of people just subscribed to On Our Backs the way I subscribe to art magazines now. It was part of an identity.

GS: I know certain gay magazines were delivered to people’s homes and sold in stores wrapped in opaque paper – was it hard to disseminate the magazine just in terms of censorship?

DC: Yeah, we were still totally dealing with that in my era. Depending on what the cover image was some stores would only sell it if it was wrapped. We had a lot of problems getting it into Canada. Canada actually has some notoriously weird laws around obscenity that mean well but are misguided, you know? We eventually started printing in Canada as the magazine was a big seller in Canada and it was harder to get it across the border than it was just to print it there and ship it back to the U.S.. Canadian bookstores were big supporters.

GS: That’s so interesting. So, moving on to the radio show: you were writing then about sex and relationships and had you published at that point?

DC: Once I started at On Our Backs, Alyson Books, which is an LGBTQ publisher that was also storied and like lasted forever but died in the early 2000s – so much of queer media went defunct in the early 2000s because more mainstream publishers would be willing to publish queer stuff and as a result the smaller queer-focused places just started folding. The editor in chief at Alyson had decided that they wanted to do a lesbian oral sex book and they literally just called me because they were looking for someone to write it and they were like, “What about Diana Cage at On Our Backs?” So, they called me and said, “Do you want to write a book called Box Lunch?” And I said: Of course. It wasn’t even my idea! It was an assignment. So, I wrote that book and the editor Angela Brown really kind of held my hand through the whole process because I’d never written a book before. She was like, “Don’t worry! I’ve got you!” I had to turn in a finished chapter once a week. She taught me how to write a book. So, after that one they were kind of like, “What else do you want to write?” That was how my sex book writing career started.

GS: I just have to ask about your research or fact-finding for a book on oral sex! 

DC: Oh my god it was so funny! It’s hard for me to look back at those early books because they represent a much younger self and I would never think or talk that way now, but I was really drawing on my own experiences. I was thinking about all the sex that I’d had and all the different lovers that I’d had and just really going from personal experience. Of course, I asked friends questions and basically turned every hangout into a discussion of how everyone liked to have oral sex. (Laughing)

GS: Oh my god that’s funny. Did your friends every get sick of you asking them about their sex lives? 

DC: No! It was such a normal part of conversation. Something we were talking about anyways. I was also having tons of sex with tons of people because that was kind of the era.

GS: I was going to ask you this a little bit later on and I do want to hear about the radio show but I am curious with you still being super active in this industry how you’ve witnessed change with lesbian and queer sex over the years. From my experience it feels almost like the exact opposite of the type of scene you came of age in.

Image courtesy of Diana Cage.

DC: I do think it’s different! My early lesbian sex experiences actually happened in bars. There was like a late ‘90s club called Sugar and it was so fun! All the gay boys wore baby barrettes in their hair and all the dykes were half naked in a mosh pit. I had sex literally on the dance floor. I remember very distinctly having this like giant hole in the crotch of my jeans and literally just fucking on the dance floor in front of everybody at that club. I don’t see that when I go out now. I also don’t go to lesbian clubs as much as I used to or like really ever. When was the last time I was in a lesbian club… (Talking to her partner) Max – when was the last time we were at a lesbian club? Which one? Yeah! But that’s a bar… like a dance club! Like the kind where you would actually have sex on the dance floor! He’s shaking his head. He has no idea. (Laughing) In New York. It would have been Dee Finley’s club, what was it called? … OMG or Choice Cunts? It was Choice Cunts. That was the last place we went out dancing on a regular basis. It was a party run by Ellie Conant, who went by The Gaysha. Ellie died of cancer a few years ago. She was an amazing, beautiful person. I adored her. Everyone did.

GS: Just because I have never heard anyone describe this party can you tell me a little bit about what that party was like?

DC: Oh Choice Cunts was great! Those were very fun, very good times. Choice Cunts was very glamorous and sexy, but it was usually in smaller spaces, so you knew everyone there. Everybody would be hanging out on the street in front of the club, so you’d walk up and immediately see a dozen friends. The party was really sexy and always had really good music. There was dancing and a bar. Ellie had fantastic taste. She was really smart, she was a great promoter and she just threw a really, really good party!

GS: That was a little bit before I was living in New York! Thanks for describing it!

DC: It was hot! I think it changed bars at one point but it was always in really good spaces.

GS: Do you have any thoughts on the effect of dating apps and digital networking on hookup culture and sex in general?

DC: Well, I think it makes cruising less possible. I miss getting picked up! You know? At Meow Mix in New York and Cattyshack in Brooklyn you could be standing out front smoking – thank god I don’t smoke anymore, smoking seems so unsexy to me now, but at the time people still smoked and some hot ass butch would roll up and light my cigarette and it was so fun to actually get picked up! It was so sexy! I look at Tinder now and I’m like who even are these people and how do I know if they’re sexy or not?

GS: It’s hard to read someone’s swagger through a photograph. 

DC: Mhmm! Exactly. I know people like their apps but it has never worked for me even when I’ve tried it out, it just isn’t hot.

GS: Yeah, I feel you. I know this is a little general, but do you think it’s had a different effect for queer women and lesbians and female identified people versus gay men?

DC: It’s affected gay men too because I remember talking to my stylist in New York. He was talking about picking people up online and apps and stuff and how it’s killed cruising culture for gay men. It sort of changes the way that sex works because you kind of already know what’s going to happen before the person ever comes over. You’ve already texted about it and talked about everything you want to do. In the late ‘90s and early 2000s dykes were really interested in trying to keep cruising culture alive. Of course, because we’re lesbians, we’d organize cruising nights, which is ridiculous. (Laughing) People would organize these cruising nights where everybody was supposed to go to Dolores Park and cruise each other.

GS: (Laughing) I love that it’s organized.

DC: I know it’s such a lesbian thing to do, right? Treat cruising for sex like running a food co-op. We had meetings! But even outside of the non-cruising nights that we organized we still picked each other up. Everyone was very into flagging with hankies. At least in my scene it was very common. I also hung with a more leather-friendly scene. We were inspired by gay male culture as a way to be more sexually liberated and to enjoy a particular type of public sexuality. For years it was so normal to me to think hankie code that when I saw a hankie in someone’s pocket and they weren’t doing it on purpose I would think, oh that person’s a fisting top, and then realize no, they just keep it around to, like, wipe the sweat off their face. When I first started dating my partner Max he often had a bandana in his back pocket and I remember one night going out to a club, and we were walking around, and he had a yellow hankie in his left back pocket and I was like, you can’t wear that when we’re together because everyone’s going to think that I want you to pee on me!

GS: That’s hilarious! I love that. So, tell me a little bit about the radio show and coming from a writing background what was it like to kind of alter your content and be able to speak about it or to present it over the radio?

DC: Well, I felt like it was the same because it was just like editing a magazine: you would come up with a theme and a bunch of different segments and so it felt like a very natural transition for me.

GS: Was it weekly?

DC: It was every night! It was every night from 10pm to 1am.

GS: Wow! That’s a long segment!

DC: I know! Tell me about it! I was on the radio, by myself for three hours a night every night! I can’t believe that was my life for so many years.

GS: Did you play two hours of music? (Laughing)

DC: You weren’t allowed to play any music because of licensing issues. It was just a talk show. We brought guests on and I had a producer who came up with ideas, but I don’t know, it was very weird! I was responsible for coming up with the content and so usually I would talk about whatever was in the news that day. I definitely talked about my personal life a lot which was kind of weird because then regular listeners would call in and talk with me about my life. For instance, one time I had been talking about a problem I was having with my girlfriend, and apparently I talked about it so many nights in a row that a caller called in and said, “I am a licensed therapist and I just want you to know that your girlfriend is cheating on you.” (Laughing) This therapist had put together so many clues from listening to me talk about it every night. It turned out he was right. This musician named Swati Sharma who I was totally in love with was a guest on my show that night. She was just so sexy. She heard this whole thing happen and she was horrified. I was kind of in a fugue state. As soon as the show ended, she put me in a cab and took me to the Cubbyhole and bought me a beer and really took care of me. She said, “I’m really sorry that happened, that was really awful.” I was in shock, honestly. I was so freaked out that I don’t think I realized how weird it was to have a complete stranger call me and tell me that my girlfriend was cheating on me.

GS: Yeah! That’s like super traumatic and in front of an entire audience…

DC: It was a lot!

GS: Was your audience mostly queer?

DC: It was all types of people! An early group that embraced satellite radio was truckers for obvious reasons. So there were a lot of truckers that called in and because I had come out of San Francisco and had come out of a very trans-friendly culture and had trans lovers and talked about gender and identity so much, I really developed a following of trans truckers. They would come out to me over the radio and I thought that was amazing and so special. With trucking you’re your own boss, and the truck is kind of like your office, and you could go to your “office” dressed in whatever you felt most comfortable in. So truck driving was appealing to a lot of trans folks because they could dress the way they wanted to. They could dress in ways they might not have felt comfortable dressing if they worked in an office full of cis people.

Image courtesy of Diana Cage.

GS: Wow that’s amazing! How did it feel to have that communication with people over the radio?

DC: At the time it felt very normal. I didn’t think anything of it because my life was so queer it made sense that my callers would be queer and trans people, but looking back on it, it was very special.

GS: It’s super intimate. 

DC: Yeah.

GS: I don’t want keep you for ages and ages! I guess the last thing I’ll ask you Diana is what you’re working on now?

DC: I’m writing a novel/memoir now. The last book I put out was in 2015 and it was called The Lesbian Sex Bible and I feel like ever since then I’ve been trying to move away from this sex writing career which has been amazing and I’ve loved it, but it’s time to move on and do something else. Sex writing is a very different world than it used to be

GS: In what ways? 

DC: We’re more open and there’s more of it which is wonderful, but it feels less intimate now and more of an industry. And it’s not really an industry I want to participate in anymore. I think I just grew out of it. So, I’m working on a novel called The Husbands that’s really a memoir. It’s a memoir about love and sex in the ‘90s and early 2000s.

GS: Do you have a publisher?

DC: I have a few options but it’s all still up in the air. All of the other books I’ve written and there’s been kind of a lot of them – I already knew where they were going to be published. I had a contract and a deadline and all of those things. I’ve never just allowed myself to write a book and then find a publisher and not have to write it under deadline. It’s liberating, but it’s making it way too slow. Deadlines motivate me.

GS: (Laughing) I know how you feel. I can’t wait to read it!

DC: I know! Me too! I’m excited about it.

GS: I could go on and on and ask you a million questions, but I appreciate your time so very much and thank you, so much for being willing to do this!

DC: You’re so welcome!