I grew up thirty miles down the highway in San Marcos, and I've still got family there, so I guess I'm pretty well rooted.

Promised Lands was a better book in my opinion, and it's still my mother's favorite of the three I've done, but I doubt anyone who isn't a blood relative has ever heard of it. Which is to say expectations aren't worth much in the book world.

The defining aspects of westerns are still pretty much in place - namely landscape and conflict. In other books the conflict can be internal, but in westerns it usually plays out on a big stage.

I grew up thirty miles down the highway in San Marcos, and I've still got family there, so I guess I'm pretty well rooted.

When I was six I wanted to be a ballerina. By the time I was eight I was fairly sure this plan wasn't panning out. I began aspiring to be an "Aquamaid" at a resort called "Aquarena Springs" in my hometown of San Marcos: Aquamaids got to wear mermaid tails and feed milk bottles underwater to Ralph the Swimming Pig for an audience submerged in a "submarine".

I wrote a paper [in school] on [William] Faulkner and no one could tell what the sentences meant.

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.