I do not often follow my characters off on tangents or change my story on a whim. I have an outline which I follow quite sternly...for a good long while. Then it turns out in some way to be insurmountably wrong and I am forced to re-think every component. Usually at this point I throw hundreds of pages away.

Honestly, I really didn't want to take on World War II France, but when I came across the story of a nineteen-year-old Belgian woman who created an escape route out of Nazi-Occupied France, I was hooked.

My next guest [ for party with five favorite fictional characters] would be Scarlett from Gone With The Wind. I mean, come on, I have to know if she ever got Rhett back.

[I am more than happy to invite my five favorite fictional characters.]Roland Deschain from Stephen King's Dark Tower series. There's a whole world about Roland left to know. I've got questions. He'd have answers. So pour him a glass of wine.

In the end, there's only one thing you can believe. Bodies are honest; they don't lie.

I absolute adore epic journeys that require a protagonist to fight for every victory in the hopes of finding triumph.

Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don't understand.