If you do not love what you do, if you are not appropriately grateful for the chance to create something magical each time you sit down at the computer or with a pencil and paper in hand, somewhere along the way your writing will betray you.

Fiction writers are strange beasts. They are, like all writers, observers first and foremost. Everything that happens to and around them is potential material for a story, and they look at it that way.

We are constantly being put to the test by trying circumstances and difficult people and problems not necessarily of our own making.

We live out our lives as we are meant to live them-with some choice, with some chance, but mostly as a result of the persons we are.

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.

Might have, could have, may have, should have—the haves and have nots reduced to pointless possibilities.

In bad weather, I spent hours drawing action figures on paper, coloring them, backing them on cardboard, then cutting them out and creating whole stories around their lives.