I loved getting my M. B. A., and I really enjoyed being an accountant and financial analyst before I quit my day job twenty-five years ago to write full time. I just liked writing more…plus, I knew even then that as a full-time writer, I'd get plenty of chances to do business-type stuff, while as an accountant, I probably wouldn't get a lot of opportunities to write about dragons.

Murphy is a writer's best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he'll steal the silver.

One of the things everybody seems to want to ask writers is, "Where do you get your ideas?" When people ask me this, my usual response is, "Ideas are the easy part. The hard part is writing them down.

There are three things that any scene in a book or short story can do: (1) It can advance the plot, (2) It can explain the background or backstory, or (3) It can deepen the characterization.