I write pretty much anywhere - on planes, in hotel rooms, anywhere in my house.

For me a thriller is a very carefully structured story.

I was editor of my high school literary magazine and a reporter for the school newspaper.

But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.

The outline is 95 percent of the book. Then I sit down and write, and that's the easy part.

Generally my typical books have lots of twists and turns a big surprise ending and then usually another surprise at the end and ideally, as in Garden of Beasts, we get to the very end and we find at the last few pages that there's yet another surprise.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.