It took me about 12 years to reach my million-word mark. The challenge now is to continue to challenge myself.

It's possible to become so comfortable with one's style and structure that one ceases to grow.

My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.

That bedrock faith that I could write was what blinded me to attempts to discourage me.

Editors of open anthologies actively seek submissions from all comers, established and unknown. They are willing to read whatever the tide washes up at their feet.

If you write, one of the questions you're always trying to answer is, Where do you get your ideas? And, if you write, you know how pointless a question this is and how difficult it is to answer.

Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy.