I was filling entire school notebooks with stories by Grade 3. Of course, they were double-spaced, and the handwriting was huge.

Facebook, from what I can tell, is the virtual equivalent of dropping into the homes of several million people, all of whom say at the same time: 'Hey! Let's set up the slide projector!

Before I left the 'Star' last year to write books full-time, I welcomed catastrophe. It was material. Missed planes, broken pipes, dead lawns, digestive disorders, you name it, if it was something that had gone horribly wrong, it was worth banging out 600 words about.

Once you come up with a premise, you have to work out how it all happened. It's a bit like coming up with a spectacular roof design first. Before you can get it up there, you need to build a solid foundation and supporting structure.

Some authors, when starting a novel, imagine a place first. Others, a character starts taking shape in their head. I start with a hook, a situation, a 'what if.

Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.

Generally speaking, rural drivers are a much better behaved species than city drivers. I'm not sure whether they're intrinsically this way, or there are just fewer opportunities for them to do behave badly. You can't go around running red lights if there aren't any red lights to run.