Jealousy is a potent emotion, of course, and Facebook, texting, email, fan Web pages... In theory, being someone like George Clooney's or Halle Berry's paramour - woo hoo - how great would that be? But wait a minute... er, no, probably kind of a nightmare.

Jealousy is a potent emotion, of course, and Facebook, texting, email, fan Web pages... In theory, being someone like George Clooney's or Halle Berry's paramour - woo hoo - how great would that be? But wait a minute... er, no, probably kind of a nightmare.

I keep a couple of notebooks too into which I record ideas for story titles or characters or situations, and these notes help me quite a bit when I'm feeling at loose ends and not sure of what to work on next.

Thirty years ago, the Pandora's box of the Internet wasn't yet a fact of life, and celebrities inhabited a more remote, hard-to-reach plane.

Tangentially, Americans, despite many of us being prone to sometimes-eyebrow-raising disclosures about our private lives on social media, still retain what I think of as reactionary views about sexuality and intimacy.

The effects of fame on the not-famous people who are close to a celebrity - this is definitely a topic that continues to interest me.

So much of what determines our happiness, I believe, is who we choose as our intimates.