Growing up, I didn't have a lot of toys, and personal entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination - think up a story and go live it for an afternoon.

Faith, Princess," the Prism Cat repeated. "It is a highly underrated weapon against the dark things in this world.

Lester del Rey told me repeatedly that the first and most important part of writing fiction is just to think about the story. Don't write anything down. Don't try to pull anything together right away. Just dream for a while and see what happens. There isn't any timetable involved, no measuring stick for how long it ought to take. For each book, it is different. But that period of thinking, of reflection, is crucial to how successful your story will turn out to be.

After all, you put a lot into creating a universe and everything that goes with it, and it seems a shame to use it only once.

I want you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary world that I have created, tell you things about the real world.

I want to kick-start your imagination and let you discover the places it can take you.

I am incomplete without my work. I am so closely bound to it, so much identified by it, that without it I think I would crumble into dust and drift away.