I wasn't like most girls.
I want a kiss to be so believable it gives the reader shivers.
I try not to worry about rewriting books that worked well the first time. I'm too busy writing new books to worry about things that are already in print.
I think that my vampires in general were influenced by my being allowed to watch the Hammer vampire films. Vampire Circus, also shown as Circus of Fear, was one of those movies.
I think like a detective.
I started off like everyone else does, slogging but having a compulsion to put words on paper. I didn't write or read horror or fantasy, other than children's fantasy, until I was in my teens.
I like conventions. I like meeting and greeting. I'm perched on that edge where I'm getting more attention than I quite know what to do with, though.
I guess, what I'm saying is that when I've been this surprised by my own characters and world, all bets are off.
I cannot say how strongly I object to people using other people's writing as research. Research is non-fiction, especially for horror, fantasy, science fiction. Do not take your research from other people's fiction. Just don't.
I am not a morning person.
I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print.
Here's the secret to finishing that first book. Don't rewrite as you go.
For me the Anita series is built like a mystery series, which means that as much as possible each book stands alone, so you have a mystery to solve from the beginning to the end of the book.
By 17, I was submitting to publications and collecting my first rejection slips.
If I'd been easily discouraged, I could have been a one-hit wonder.
I love animals, always have, and it seemed natural to help the ASPCA. Animals have no voice of their own, so we have to be that voice.
Everyone spends their lives trying to balance their world between good and evil.
One of my rules is never explain. A writer is a lot like a magician, if you explain how the trick works then a lot of the magic turns mundane.
I'm more influenced by my own interests than anyone else's. Writers have to entertain themselves, or they can't entertain anyone else.
It was just you had to be strong, and if you weren't strong you're a victim and you're not going to make it. That was the reality when I was growing up.
I feel that if you are blessed, or lucky enough, to be doing well, you should help others.
I always treated writing as a profession, never as a hobby. If you don't believe in yourself, no one else will.
If you're open to it, New Orleans will teach you about yourself, but if you want to hide from who you really are, the city will help you do that, too.
When the mind withdraws into itself and dispenses with facts it makes only chaos.
When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.
Theories that go counter to the facts of human nature are foredoomed.
The modern minds in each generation are the critics who preserve us from a petrifying world, who will not leave us to walk undisturbed in the ways of our fathers.
The fullness of life is in the hazards of life.
Mind and spirit together make up that which separates us from the rest of the animal world, that which enables a man to know the truth and that which enables him to die for the truth.
Great art is the expression of a solution of the conflict between the demands of the world without and that within.
