A hundred hundred heartbeats..." whispered Sabriel, tears falling down her face.

But think of how much worse it would be to sit here, not knowing. Until the Dead choke the Ratterlin and Hedge walks across the dry bed of the river to batter down the door.

Often, I get the feeling that the story is really happening somewhere and all I'm doing is trying to work out the best way to tell it.

I have never known what to tell anybody. Except that it is better to do something than nothing, even if the cost is great.

For all my longer works (i.e. the novels) I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on.

Being published is not a necessary validation or a path everyone wants to take with their work. Writing—and finishing—a novel is a great thing in itself, whether or not the book is published, or becomes widely-read or not.

I don't do all the background and the worldbuilding before I start the story. What I do is I work out the bare minimum I need to start the story, and often that really is a bare minimum - it's a character in a situation, and I know nothing about the character, I know nothing about the situation, and then I think about it for a long time, and make notes about where I think the story is going to go and so on, but I don't really make notes to do with the background or the magic system or the world.