The Gingerbread House has four walls, a roof, a door, a window, and a chimney. It is decorated with many sweet culinary delights on the outside.But on the inside there is nothing-only the bare gingerbread walls.It is not a real house-not until you decide to add a Gingerbread Room.That's when the stories can move in.They will stay in residence for as long as you abstain from taking the first gingerbread bite.

I usually focus on the whole group of characters in any given work-in-progress, and as a result they become particularly dear to me as I delve into their innermost motivations and live out their lives.

It is interesting that we call something good a “dream,” but being called a “dreamer” is somewhat of a putdown. Without dreamers, no dream would ever be given reality, and we would live in a very small and shallow world. If you are a secret dreamer, it’s your time to announce yourself.

The act of sharing with readers was at first too much of an intimate thing. But it evolved into an intense necessity to share.

Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters.

Fantasy is not the literature of subversion of the status quo but of 'awakening to' the status quo.

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.