Ideas aren't magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.

Ideas aren't magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.

A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.

One of my great passions is the collection of historical trivia.

I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.

I write sets of books, but I've also written a lot of orphans.

When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.