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 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.

When Larry Wright won the Pulitzer for The Looming Tower we all strutted around for weeks, until some sourpuss among us noted that it was actually Larry, and not the rest of us, who won the prize.

It seems like the Western genre has crept out of its casings during the last few years, and expanded to include books and movies we wouldn't originally have thought of as westerns.

When I started escaping to a neighbor's house to watch what I darn well pleased, it turned out to be The Big Valley. Every afternoon my friend and I would pour grape juice over mounds of ice cream and settle in to see what was happening with Barbara Stanwyck and Linda Evans and the boys in The Big Valley.

Angle of Repose is one of my favorite books. I fell in love with it in college. When I submitted The Night Journal to my agent she got very excited because she said it reminded her of Angle of Repose.

I changed my hopes to being a singer [when I was a child] and sat around with my hair in my face droning Mac Davis songs. Writing was sort of a last stand. Come to think of it, it was the only "talent" I had that anyone asked for more of.