Our country has the oldest tradition of storytelling, and this was much before writing stories even became a norm.

I believe that every writer evolves with every successive novel. I view myself as work-in-progress.

I am a part of the old school where I feel that purity of the language should be retained. But English is a constantly evolving language where new words are being added to the dictionary, so I don't see any harm in experimenting with the language. Only poor editing standards need to be improved.

I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, You cant know where youre going if you dont know where youve been. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.

Writing is incidental to my primary objective, which is spinning a good yarn. I view myself as a storyteller more than a writer. The story - and hence the extensive research that goes into each one of my books - is much more important than the words that I use to narrate it.

What I would not like is to be ignored. I write from the heart. I don't write for me. I write for my readers.

I work in a business environment forty hours a week, and writing is what I do to unwind. It allows me to transport myself to a happy place where I can indulge my hopes, beliefs, aspirations and fantasies. It also allows me to live and breathe a topic for eighteen months while I'm researching and writing.