When I'm looking for a strong female character, or a strong character at all, I'm looking for a character that has a purpose in that story, that has an interior life of some sort. They don't have to be physically strong; they don't have to be morally strong or ethically strong, because men and women come in a huge variety of all of those things. Emotionally, ethically - I'm less concerned with that. I just don't want them to be props. That's the only thing that offends me.

The reader is not the customer. The retailer is the customer. So I try to have as much interaction with the retailers as possible because those are my customers.

What I worry about is working in this serial medium, where people are talking about your stories before they're done, we have this instant feedback loop now. I'm very active on Tumblr and I have a very active engagement with readers and I love it, but I don't want to start writing to try to please someone else. I don't want my meter to get skewed.

You can't write something actively trying to please everyone - you're going to end up with watery soup that way. You just have to write stories you would want to read and hope that people like them.

Seriously, just buy the [expletive deleted] book. I promise you'll like it. Unless you're [expletive deleted].

My husband makes fun of me, because I know I can use strong prose to jazz-hand my way through plot that isn't as interesting as I'd like it to be.

I wish I could say confidently that pacing remains my weak point, if you could talk about your own stuff without sounding like you're self-obsessed. But I think you kind of have to be.