If I ever saw my muse she would be an old woman with a tight bun and spectacles poking me in the middle of the back and growling, "Wake up and write the book!
Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.
I've had a love affair with the desert ever since I can remember. No matter what I wrote - contemporary romance, spy thriller, high fantasy - it was going to have a desert in it.
The first thing you see in my hallway is a large 18th-century bust of Milton, who stares at me as I watch TV and reminds me of the grave and committed role of the poet. Although he was blind, Milton had one of the most unswerving gazes of all English poets.
When I get an idea for a book, something appeals to me, it's usually a character. I'll see a picture of a female marshal in front of the courthouse in Miami and she's got a shotgun on her hip and it goes up on an angle. And she's good-looking. And I say, 'I've got to use her.'
I think most writers' houses are disappointing. What's much more atmospheric and interesting are the places they wrote about.
I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.
I've been writing for years, you know, and when I get to a particular place, city, or different locale, I find myself first of all being challenged by those that love me to write more.
