One of the things that I've noticed over the years is that I seem to be fascinated as a writer with the notion that we already have all that we need.

Here is where I like to burst in as a writer, to take one strong sensory detail or image and instead of enhancing it or directing attention to it by shouting about it, I simply take it away.

I've always been creative verbally, had a flair, my teachers said - wrote great expository essays in elementary school, scribbled little poems, embraced all writing assignments. And all along I read voraciously - first in Russian and then, after we left the USSR, in English, and even Spanish.

My characters often start out with a loss of some sort, usually a loss of emotion or purpose or hope. What I do in the course of my writing is weave a thematic arc of fulfillment. It is my constant theme as a creator.

I also find the desert a wonderful metaphor for desolation and yet the exact counterpart of the ocean with its hidden depths. Both are vast, harsh, implacable, homogenous to the untrained eye, and beautiful. Bothallow the wind to roam on the surface. And both serve as wonderful vehicles for human survival stories.

What we need in fantasy is the sudden balm of clarity - a temporary reprieve from life's white noise and clamor of pain, a kind of time-out. Such clarity, a new perspective, is made possible by fantastic metaphor.

Clad in metaphor, the world becomes newborn to our senses, like a phoenix. It is the most effective fresh presentation of the elements of our life for our jaded, numbed, even ailing sense of imagination.