My mother had been slicing up the chicken. She took a drumstick and dropped it on the floor. She kicked it around a little, picked it up and put it on the edge of the plate. "There," she said, "we'll give him this drumstick." "Deal.

I take in a lot of stuff from real life, movies, television, news and it all gets mixed in my head and somehow turns into a story idea.

Excuse me?" I said, palms down on the Formica tabletop. "Coffee? I thought we came here for pie." "I don't eat the kind of pie they serve here." I felt a flash of heat go through my stomach. I knew firsthand the kind of pie Ranger liked.

I don't need shoes. I need a night scope. You think they sell night scopes someplace here?

I don't need handcuffs to enslave a woman.

I almost never shoot people.

I wasnt always a writer. When I went to college and majored in fine arts, I was a painter. Then I was a stay-at-home mom.