Usually my writing is very over the top and bombastic and very, like, ‘I’m amazing! Look at me!’

I read my first P.G. Wodehouse when I was 12.

It’s so, so awful for my entire body and my spine and my hands, and I have a perfectly good desk to write at, but I don’t care. I love writing in bed.

Everyone wants to be liked; everyone wants approval. No one likes being ignored.

Ghost! I miss him! Is that weird? I miss him even though I invented him. I feel a lot of tenderness toward him. I don’t write a lot of stuff that is sad or that is tender and affectionate, so that has a very special place in my heart.

In the hands of a passive-aggressive person who wants to abdicate responsibility for things, texting is a great tool. You can really go nuts.

I love reading religious authors. Especially in the sort of circle I move in, people tend to be more secular, and I love reading books by just really smart people of religious faith. It’s always a really cool perspective.

There’s no specific mission statement for the ‘Toast.’

I’m on Twitter a lot of the day because I really like Twitter. It’s great for jokes. But when I’m writing, I can’t do anything else. I can’t even listen to music. I just have to write, and then I can do something else. I can’t multitask.

My credentials, briefly: I no longer go to church or believe in God, but I can still name every one of the fruits of the Spirit and reeled for days upon hearing the announcement that Audio Adrenaline was reunited with one of the singers from DC Talk.

One of the things that would be great is to some day have so many women comedy writers that we wouldn’t say there’s just one type of female humor. There’s lots.

I spent the first 22 years of my life absorbing everything, like a big disgusting cell, and now I’m disgorging it with jokes added out into the world. That’s a really gross metaphor.

A lot of my creative energy is spent coming up with a concept that, once I get it, I feel like it writes itself.

Humor is always more interesting when it comes from someone who’s had more than, like, five experiences.

I have a lot of faith in the power of joking to make something thoughtful.

My history teacher could make us feel like he was imparting rare gossip to us when he was talking about Maria Theresa and the Habsburgs. I just loved that sense of – the Western canon is here, and it’s gossipy and tawdry, and everyone is sort of goofy.

I grew up in a home where reading was a big deal.

Weirdly, often the more I write, the more ideas I have.

I have fun going on Twitter and the Internet. I feel safe and comfortable, and I wish everyone could feel that way.

My parents are both pastors. In the ‘80s and ’90s in the mainstream Christian world, it was not really common for a woman – especially a married woman and a mother – to be a pastor.

I graduated with an English degree and worked for awhile in academic publishing.

The most successful Subway customers, of course, are the ones who can’t keep their hands off their sandwich. Join your artist in the sandwich assembling process. That sneeze guard is a suggestion. That sneeze guard is trying to intimidate you into staying on the customer‘s side of the partition.

After I do my first writing of the day, I will generally look at Twitter and Google News – and that’s my big media secret. I look at Twitter and I look at Google because they pull all the headlines from other websites.

In my final year of attending a Christian sports camp in rural Missouri, the year before I started high school, they began to offer an elective Bible study group for young Christians who wanted a chance to read in the afternoons instead of learn to water-ski.

I love ‘Jane Eyre,’ and I love the Bronte sisters. I actually didn’t read any of them until I was in college, so I don’t have quite the same connection with them that I think a lot of women do.