The imagination is a muscle. If it is not exercised, it atrophies.

I very rarely want to go back and fix things, because I'm much more interested in the next thing, and in taking what I learned from the things that don't work, and applying them to new things that may work.

Nothing's ever the same," she said. "Be it a second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.

One thing I've learned: you can know anything, it's all there, you just have to find it.

Suggestions? Put it aside for a few days, or longer, do other things, try not to think about it. Then sit down and read it (printouts are best I find, but that's just me) as if you've never seen it before. Start at the beginning. Scribble on the manuscript as you go if you see anything you want to change. And often, when you get to the end you'll be both enthusiastic about it and know what the next few words are. And you do it all one word at a time.

Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on.

I think that is something that I always like in my work - the sense of inclusion rather than the sense of otherness.