Popularity: 2
Vote:   | As far back as I can remember, I have been making up stories. I didn't write stories until I was 12 1/2. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Be true to your characters and they'll be true to you. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Each book is a unique challenge. Book nine took me to New Mexico, which I had never even visited until I went to research it for location. I'd never set a book in a place I knew nothing about, so that was difficult. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Everybody fears different things. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Everyone is always wanting some horrible-or at least interesting-incident that pushed me into dark fantasy, but I think I just came this way. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Everyone spends their lives trying to balance their world between good and evil. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Here's the secret to finishing that first book. Don't rewrite as you go. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | I always treated writing as a profession, never as a hobby. If you don't believe in yourself, no one else will. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I am not a morning person. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I am the world's worst hinter. I always give too much away. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I don't know exactly what draws people to certain characters. I think characters are just like people. Who knows why you have chemistry with one person, but not another? It's a mystery. I am surprised, and humbled, that people are so enthused by characters that I created out of thin air. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I don't really think back to my grandmother's stories for inspiration, but I think that I have absorbed those stories into the pores of my being. It was simply an accepted fact that ghosts were real, that the dead didn't always rest easy, that things could move by themselves, and that simple things could be frightening. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I don't write about scary things. I write about what comes to me. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I feel that if you are blessed, or lucky enough, to be doing well, you should help others. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I have an origin story for vampirism, and no, I won't share it here. If I ever share it, it will be in the plot of a book when it's time for it. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I have never had an editor ask me to explain anything more than was already down on the paper. I've done work for five major publishers, and countless editors, and it's never come up. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | I have the main cast pretty down by now, so the monster or the murder, or the mystery comes first, then I write new characters that are needed to make the mystery work. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I haven't found a point in love scenes that I feel is off-limits, yet. I do avoid medical terms, clinical phrases. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I just don't have the time for short stories anymore. Sad but true. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I knew almost nothing about voodoo. That was the biggest paranormal research I had to do. Guns and police procedure were the other area I had to research. I didn't know nearly enough about either. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I like having the books, and I like having the fans, I love sharing. But I've been invited to more menages a trois than anything. People read the books and assume I do what I write about. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I love my fans, because they are such a wide demographic. They go from everything from teens to 50+. I have a wide romance following, and a wide following among people - especially men - who have a violent background, military or police or whatever. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I loved the idea that my family name could mean we were descended from fairies. It amused me then, and apparently, it still does. Other than that it has no bearing on my family. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | I never do last words. They always seem so final. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I never understood why this Puritan attitude towards sex seemed so prevalent in a genre that prided itself on pushing almost every other kind of boundary. I'd read books that were so graphic in their violence that it made me queasy, yet put a little sex in and everything goes to hell. Shouldn't violence be a worse crime than sex? |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I talked to combat veterans and was privileged to have them share some of their experiences with me. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I think like a detective. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I use to blame my family's penchant for macabre true stories and other real life tragedies for my dark turn of mind. Recently, I've had to rethink that. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I want a kiss to be so believable it give the reader shivers. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I was more interested in what would happen if we all woke up tomorrow and had to deal with real monsters in the real world. How would it work? What would we do? What would it change if the break came that late in our development as a society? |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I was raised with just my grandmother. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I wasn't like most girls. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I write about shapeshifters, too, and they get to do more than just drink blood. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I'd read a few books about the fey that came close to capturing what I thought the fey should really be like, but no one had really done it the way I wanted to see it done. So I decided to do it myself. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I'm more influenced by my own interests than anyone else's. Writers have to entertain themselves, or they can't entertain anyone else. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I'm not a good follower, but I'm a good team player, as long as I'm not having to take orders that are stupid. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I'm not terribly fond of soapboxes. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | I'm older than everyone keeps thinking I am. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I've always been attracted to ghoulies and ghosties. As early as 5 I was begging to watch horror movies. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I've had to be very careful when I use real settings and homes, to make sure people can't find them. Now I'm much more cautious about giving directions to places. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | I've lost track of the number of people who want to be writers but never actually write anything. Talking about writing, dreaming about writing, can be very fun, but it won't get a book written. You've got to write. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | If I'd been easily discouraged, I could have been a one-hit wonder. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | If people would write exactly what I wanted to read I wouldn't feel so compelled to write myself. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | In the book, if it's something really horrible, my rule is that it's either something I've already heard or read, or it's something that's impossible without my magic system. Some of the strangest little throw-away items, things that have happened to victims in my books, I didn't make up. I'd researched it. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Maybe I'm just orally fixated. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Most of the monsters... are based on some sort of mythology. Every culture and even some geographical areas have monsters and mythology that is their own. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | My characters surprise me constantly. My characters are like my friends-I can give them advice, but they don't have to take it. If your characters are real, then they surprise you, just like real people. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | My daughter is 8, and she loves mummies. Her favorite book for ages was Cinderella Skeleton, where all the characters are ghouls and such. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | My family, for many generations, had been Scots-Irish hill people. I'm so white-bread, if you cut me I'd bleed bleached flour! I have no ethnicity to me, and I've always wanted some. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | My first book, Nightseer, was much more traditional fantasy, in the vein of Robert E. Howard meets Tolkien. It was meant to be the first of a series. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | My plots rarely change in mid-stream, only the romance arc, or the character development catches me off-guard or an occasional nasty bit by the villain. It's not usually anything that changes the book too much-just steps up the intensity. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | My writing has changed a great deal, as any writer's will after a decade. My writing has become more lush, richer. I can be sparse and minimalistic when I want to be, or I can wrap the sensuality of the words across the paper. It's a choice now, rather than a happy accident. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | My writing style is very sensual, as in sensory detail. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Never argue with your characters; they know themselves better than you do. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Nightseer was my first novel, ever, so I will always have a great deal of affection for the world and the characters. My first dream realized. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Now that I'm being very successful, publishers are trying to mainstream me, but I'm unabashedly genre. It's what I like to read, what I like to write. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | One book will often give me ideas for a totally different plot and a totally different location that will then push the other plots further down the line. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | One of the things that puzzled me in most horror novels was the level of punishment for sex. Sex of almost any kind either caused horrible things to happen, or was punished by death, or possession, or other terrible things. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Perfection is an unattainable goal. It isn't going to be perfect. Just get words down on paper, and when you stumble to what you think is the end of the book, you will have hundreds of pages of words that came out of your head. It may not be perfect, but it looks like a book. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Readers respond to every genre intensely, if it's a genre that appeals to them. Again, who can say why anyone enjoys horror and dark fantasy? If I can't answer the question for myself, I wouldn't dream of trying to answer it for others. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Some people just don't seem to understand the concept of fiction. It is fiction; it ain't true, folks. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The fey in this country keep to themselves, and are a separate nation, much like the American Indians, but with even more autonomy. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The greatest challenge to writing in someone else's world is abiding by their rules. I like playing by my rules in my own world. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | They found human bones in the lake at our apartment complex and brought the police in. I took my little notebook and went down to talk to the policeman keeping people away from the crime scene. I wanted to ask him some very strange questions, because I had a ghoul attack I wanted to make as accurate as possible. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Though I am a little overwhelmed by technology, I see its uses, and its advantages. I have never written a book that wasn't on computer. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Two things I do well in books are sex and violence, but I don't want gratuitous sex or violence. The sex and violence are only as graphic as need be. And never included unless it furthers the plot or character development. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | What we prefer to read is sort of like sexual preference, you like what you like. Most of the time you have no clue why. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | When I first started writing, I did two pages a day, five or six days a week. On my worst day I could do two pages before I had to get to work in corporate America. I was working a full-time job when I started my first book, so I know it's hard to fit it in, but not impossible. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | When I go to a room, I check people out. You'll often see me wanting to sit with my back to a wall, more cautious than I would have been. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | When sex is necessary for the plot of a book, or a character development, then I don't shy away from it. Why should I? |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | You either mellow at 30, or your head explodes-take your choice. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | You'd think a sociopath assassin wouldn't have a fan following but he does. |