Being with a small publisher has been huge. They bat for me for everything.

I could imagine that a character could do almost anything at any time, and that was the freedom of the whole thing. But keeping track of what was plausible for certain characters [was the challenge].

A story is built on characters and reasons.

I'm never going to write a whole paragraph describing what a living room looks like.

The better we are at accepting the limits of our world, the more easily we can embrace what we have.

Fiction demands structures and recognizable shapes. Big surprises only draw attention to the writer's hand.

Until I became a nurse, no one had ever asked me to sign a book contract. I had been writing for decades, read thousands of books, and even worked in publishing for 10 years. Who knew that nursing would be my break?