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.

Don't bother to argue anything on the Internet. And I mean, ANYTHING.... The most innocuous, innocent, harmless, basic topics will be misconstrued by people trying to deconstruct things down to the sub-atomic level and entirely miss the point.... Seriously. Keep peeling the onion and you get no onion.

I am a novelist at heart.

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.

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.

However I will never forget what Marion [Zimmer Bradley] did for me by accepting that first story from a stupid enthusiastic kid.

For as long as there's anyone to ask 'Why?' the answer will always be, 'Why not?