Now death is death! and yet is not one death Another death? Stabbing is not the same As shooting! Would you say a strangled man Was drown'd? The end is one, the means are many, And there the difference lies!

In Birmingham, the women are maintained, the men are greedily lustful, and the children are named after high-end automobiles. You are just as likely to run into a Bentley, Mercedes, Porsche, and Lexus walking on the sidewalk as you are cruising the downtown streets.

I believe the first story I ever wrote was about a young girl who was terribly mistreated by her very cruel parents, and one day the girl fled to the woods to live amongst a pack of wolves. Hey, I was eleven, loved wolves, and had been grounded for what I felt was a minor infraction. Can you blame me?

To write three series a year you only need to commit to writing 10 pages per day, or editing 50 pages of text per day. Plus, writing is my job, and I need to write to eat, so I'm highly motivated to get up and get to work!

Here's a news flash--writers are selfish people. Truth is, creative types like me are driven by one impulse--to make up a world in which we get to control everything and everyone. We decide who enters and who exits, what the weather will be, who will hook up with whom, who will win and who will lose. It makes us feel powerful and, in all honesty, has relatively little to do with thinking about what will make anyone else happy.

That's also part of having great editors -- they can sort of be honest with you and say, "I see where you're headed with this, but I don't think it's there yet. Dig deeper, babe, and come back with something more." And that's what you do, you dig waaaaaaaay down and you walk around the block eight million times and then you have it -- shazam! And it all comes together in something soooo much better than you thought you were capable of.

Am I the only one who secretly hopes that the Curiosity rover will be swallowed up by a giant alien worm living just below Mars's surface?