I love smart commercial fiction. Susan Isaacs, for example and the readers who interest me are, in the preponderance, women. I am one of them; I like the books they like.
Beth Gutcheon
I'm very interested, in all my books, in community, what binds people together, which I think is an obvious consequence of being the fourth of six children.
If you're going to spend two or three years immersed in a subject, you better be deeply interested in it, or it won't be interesting to the reader.
I've found in the past that the more closely I identify with the heroine, the less completely she emerges as a person. So from the first novel I've been learning techniques to distance myself from the characters so that they are not me and I don't try to protect them in ways that aren't good for the story.
I became a writer because I love to read, yet I never get to unless I'm reviewing a book or doing research.
