You Can't Write About The Past And

Even The Classics That We Read To Our Young Children Are Full Of Wolves' Fangs And Burning Ovens And Bloody Feet And Ice Shards Piercing Hearts. Even The New Testament Climaxes With An Act Of Unspeakable Torture. Might As Well Just Read To Our Kids From The Amnesty Annual Report And Be Done With It.

I Swim In A Sea Of Words. They Flow Around Me And Through Me And, By A Process That Is Not Fully Clear To Me, Some Delicate Hidden Membrane Draws Forth The Stuff That Is The Necessary Condition Of My Life.

The Thing That Most Attracts Me To Historical Fiction Is Taking The Factual Record As Far As It Is Known, Using That As Scaffolding, And Then Letting Imagination Build The Structure That Fills In Those Things We Can Never Find Out For Sure.

Because I Worked As A Newspaper Reporter For About 14 Years Before Attempting My First Novel, I Learned To Write Under Almost Any Circumstances- By Candle Light, In Longhand, In African Villages Where There Was No Power, Under Shelling In Kurdistan.

She Was Like A Butterfly, Full Of Color And Vibrancy When She Chose To Open Her Wings, Yet Hardly Visible When She Closed Them.