When it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be.

I love meeting booksellers and readers and hearing how they've read and received my stories. Often I'm surprised by which characters they've loved best, what scenes have stayed with them, what connections they've felt between my characters' lives and theirs.

Writing fiction is a resolutely solitary pastime, and I love being with people, so the public side of being an author is, to me, the reward for all the private time invested. And I love teaching to a fault; I have a hard time not giving away a lot of my own writing energy to my students.

Of all the virtues, discretion began to seem the most rewarding: it kept people guessing and sometimes, by default, admiring.

Here we are - despite the delays, the confusion, and the shadows en route - at last, or for the moment, where we always intended to be.

Time plays like an accordion in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart; and then a single melancholy week may seem like a year's pining, one long unfolding note.

And then there's the personal question so many of Lassie's fans want to ask: Is he allowed on the furniture? Of course he is-but, then, he's the one who paid for it.