Inspiration:

"Writing a novel is a matter of mind over ass," Arsenault says. "  You have to put your ass in the chair, and type."

Arsenault doesn't wait for inspiration. Trained as a deadline news writer, he has shed the myth of the muse. On deadline, there's no time to wait for inspiration. He compares book-length fiction writing to long-distance hiking. "It's like walking fifty miles," he says. "No one part of the walk is itself very hard, but taken in total it's a tremendous amount of work." Writing 500-1,000 words a day is a reasonable goal, he says.