Writing is a way of processing our lives. And it can be a way of healing.

I've put everything I had and I've given my readers 120 percent, and that's the truth.

Even the roughest character, underneath all that hurt, is someone who wants to love and be loved.

In World War One, they called it shell shock. Second time around, they called it battle fatigue. After 'Nam, it was post-traumatic stress disorder.

My first novel is loaded with food references largely because my cupboards were bare, and I was writing hungry.

I learned not to be so bitterly defeated when my fiction took a beating from editors. I learned in advertising to color in the lines and have my work done on time and to make it the very best it could be.

There's nothing trite about being consoled in a world that does everything in its power to deliver sorrow.