I lived in Texas for 12 years (Dallas and San Antonio), and still have family and several close friends there, including in Austin. But if and when I daydream about living somewhere other than New York, Austin rarely exerts a strong appeal. This is because I’m a cold-weather person. It’s in the 80s in Brooklyn right now, and I feel like someone is going to have to remove me from the sidewalk with a pipette by day’s end. Though Texas is a perfectly nice place to live in many ways, there are about eight months a year there where I feel like a lizard baking on a rock.

Novelist (and memoir and story writer) Elizabeth McCracken recently relocated to Austin with her husband and two kids, and she talks about the city and her work with Jody Seaborn at the American-Statesman:

The new novel McCracken is working on is tentatively titled Let Your Heart Become Iron. She understandably didn’t want to say too much about the novel other than to note that it’s about a female weightlifter, is “slightly less realistic” than The Giant’s House and Niagara Falls All Over Again, and is mostly set in the 1970s. She says it shares with her previous novels her need to hit on a subject that can obsess her, whether it be gigantism, vaudeville or weightlifting.

McCracken is also asked whether she finds novels or short stories easier to write (she’s currently completing a second collection of stories as well): “ ‘Novel writing,’ she says, without hesitation. ‘The novel is just a much more forgiving form.’ ”