[My brother] was older, and since the law of the west was fairly entrenched in our household, whoever was bigger got control of the television. I sat mesmerized, and horrified, through hundreds of gunfights and became emotionally involved with everyone in Bonanza and Gunsmoke.

I'd be a dope to compare my writing with Wallace Stegner's, but that book probably influenced me in ways I didn't even realize while I was writing The Night Journal.

I think when you're a writer most of what you read influences you. The rhythms get into your head.

I got hooked on TV westerns back in the early sixties when I was about five, mostly because my brother was addicted to them and wouldn't let me watch anything else.

As for whether genre considerations influence what I write, they don't at all, but I might sell more books if they did. The Night Journal is a hodge-podge of historical fiction, western, mystery, and contemporary domestic drama. It doesn't settle into a specific market, reviewers have a hard time describing it, and sometimes it gets classified weirdly in bookstores. But from a writer's standpoint, I like that it's hard to categorize.

In middle school I wrote a paper on Hemingway and none of the sentences had more than five words.

The Night Journal received two awards that I'm terribly proud of - -the Spur from Western Writers of America, and the Willa Literary Award from Women Writing the West. Both these groups are filled with great writers and good people.