I think fiction is all about the exercise of the empathetic imagination. Part of what I do is let the stuff I read about meld with what I have experienced.

I feel like one of the things I'm trying most to do is stretch my empathetic reach, as far as it will go. I got as far as Gilles de Rais' assistant, for example, and not really as far as de Rais himself.

She thought she'd put up with however many years of stonewalling for a good reason, and she'd just figured out that as far as Castle Hubby went, she hadn't even crossed the moat yet.

I'm tempted to do everything. And sometimes I think, "Oh, come on. You can stick that detail somewhere."

Disasters occur organically in my work, in that that's the way my thinking tends, more than that's what I start out by planning. I'm sort of a catastrophist.

Oh, I usually don't know a whole lot about a subject when I begin; the process itself teaches me a lot as I go along. Usually I know enough about one narrow area of the subject to start myself going, and then everything - including a lot more research - follows from that.

I spend most of my time reading non-fiction of all sorts. Then poetry. Then fiction to blurb. Then fiction I want to read.