I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.
I also try very hard to create characters - both heroes and villains - with psychological depth.
Hardcover books are fairly expensive these days and to read one requires a significant commitment of time in our busy society. So I want to make sure that when readers buy one of my books they get something they're familiar with.
Generally my typical books have lots of twists and turns a big surprise ending and then usually another surprise at the end and ideally, as in Garden of Beasts, we get to the very end and we find at the last few pages that there's yet another surprise.
For me a thriller is a very carefully structured story.
Certainly going back to Sherlock Holmes we have a tradition of forensic science featured in detective stories.
In suspense novels even subplots about relationships have to have conflict.
I've often said that there's no such thing as writer's block; the problem is idea block.
But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.
When you work alone, you need to socialize at some level.
When a story captures me, it comes quickly and easily.
The world would be a very sad place if readers could only love one story.
My heroines, more often than not, are the ones who are troubled and resistant.
I've learned to allow myself the room to fall in love with what I'm writing.
I've been told by readers that they love how my heroes fall in love fast, first, and with conviction.
I love connecting with readers!
I can't live without my smartphone, but I really geek on coding. It's not so much technology that I like, but puzzle solving.
As for discipline and rules, I confess, I've never been good with either.
As a writer, it's disheartening to write books that you pour your soul into and not have them distributed widely enough to find their audience.
The present age has seen a great slump in humanist values.
The modern dilemma is essentially a spiritual one, and every one of its main aspects, moral, political and scientific, brings us back to the need of a religious solution.
The intercourse between the Mediterranean and the North or between the Atlantic and Central Europe was never purely economic or political; it also meant the exchange of knowledge and ideas and the influence of social institutions and artistic and literary forms.
The greatest obstacle to international understanding is the barrier of language.
The Church as a divine society possess an internal principle of life which is capable of assimilating the most diverse materials and imprinting her own image upon them.
No society lies nearer to the cyclonic path of the forces of world change than the United States, and few societies are more intellectually aware of the nature of the issues that have to be faced.
No doubt Western civilization has in the past been full of wars and revolutions, and the national elements in our culture, even when they were ignored, always provided an unconscious driving force of passion and aggressive self-assertion.
Moreover, behind this vague tendency to treat religion as a side issue in modern life, there exists a strong body of opinion that is actively hostile to Christianity and that regards the destruction of positive religion as absolutely necessary to the advance of modern culture.
Man is a means and not an end, and he is a means to economic or political ends which are not really ends in themselves but means to other ends which in their turn are means and so ad infinitum.
Man can know his world without falling back on revelation; he can live his life without feeling his utter dependence on supernatural powers.
It is true that Christianity is not bound up with any particular race or culture. It is neither of the East or of the West, but has a universal mission to the human race as a whole.
