I'm always trolling for trivia.

I’m dense when it comes to discouragement.

I’m not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.

I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I’ve never been able to sell. I’m known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre.

The money can be decent, but I really don’t recommend the work-for-hire route as an entry into publishing. Too many things can go wrong.

If you write, one of the questions you’re always trying to answer is, Where do you get your ideas? And, if you write, you know how pointless a question this is and how difficult it is to answer.

I’m one of those writers who, when writing, believes she’s god-and that she hasn’t bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books.

When I’m not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I’m not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I’m reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.

Once you’ve invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story’s grown to around a half-million words and can’t be written as anything less than a trilogy.

It’s possible to become so comfortable with one’s style and structure that one ceases to grow.