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".

The author with the greatest influence on me is my friend Stephen Harrigan, who critiques everything I write before I even bother to show it to my agent or editor. He's a truly great writer - author of Gates of the Alamo and other books you might know of, and his instincts about what's working in a story, and what's not, are just about perfect. My books would be very different without his influence.

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.

I love the writers in Austin. We stick together. We all like each other and go to each other's book signings in case no one else shows up.

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.

It took me ten years to write The Night Journal, so that was a big ordeal.