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.

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

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

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.

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

I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.

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.