I'm not a stereotypical professor type. I don't smoke a pipe and wear a tweedy jacket. I'm more like a student who stayed at the university for so long that they gave him a job to keep him out of trouble.

Do not mistake me for my mask. You see light dappling on the water and forget the deep, cold dark beneath.

The Waystone was his, just as the third silence was his. This was appropriate, as it was the greatest silence of the three, wrapping the others inside itself. It was deep and wide as autumn’s ending. It was heavy as a great river-smooth stone. It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.

Reading aloud sounds like a good idea, but honestly, it doesn't work very well. Good dialogue in a book doesn't actually bear much resemblance to real-life dialogue. For example, if you've ever seen a word-for-word transcript of people talking, it doesn't read off the page very well. The trick is to make it *seem* like it's being spoken, not to make it speakable.

We all become what we pretend to be.

Some people are going to be impatient no matter what. If I wrote two books a year, someone out there would be pissed I wasn't writing three.

I was reluctant to talk about my kids on the blog. I kept telling myself, "People aren't coming here for stories about your kids. They want to hear about the upcoming books, writing advice, conventions..."