Scott would probably want me to interrogate my affection for him, because (he might say) our brains are tricksy, pattern-seeking, biased organs, and the more fervently we believe in the veracity of the decisions we think we make with them, the more deluded we are. Or,...

“At the moment she is making slow but encouraging progress on her fourth [novel], a re-telling of Beauty and the Beast via Minoan Crete.” You’ll find this sentence over in the “Author” section of my website. It has also appeared, paraphrased, in several brochures,...

My relationship with happy endings has been on-again, off-again, as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 6, episode 16, has reminded me. I’m just getting to the series now. For a decade I’ve been going to genre conventions and passing right by the slayer swag—though I...

I tell my creative writing students that their readers will surprise them. I say that, once their story’s out there, someone will come up with a theme they’d never thought of, or a take on a character that’s strange and new and yet totally credible. I tell my students...

I haven’t had any trouble with each of my three books’ dedications. With the wording, perhaps, but never with the names, which slipped onto those first blank pages as if I’d been turning them over in my head for as long as I’d been writing the books. (Yes, OK, so...

Autumn makes me crazy, in a prickly, poignant kind of way.  Twenty years ago, I would have used the word “aching” to describe how I was feeling about it. Indeed, I likely would have needed a copy editor to point out that I’d used this word ten times in three pages....