I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.

Nothing. It just finds you a lot more attractive than it does most Humans. What can you do with a beautiful woman that you can’t do with an ugly one? Nothing. It’s just a matter of preference.

Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere.

I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.

Beware At war Or at peace, More people die Of unenlightened self-interest Than of any other disease

And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write - every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing.

I'm a 48-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I'm also comfortably asocial -- a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles -- a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.