Sara Sheridan

I have a really vivid imagination and I find it difficult to read scenes of complete graphic violence. That's not to say that graphic violence does not exist. It's just that I find it quite harrowing and I much prefer if it isn't completely outlined for me because my imagination can do that.

I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show.

Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.

Historical fiction of course is particularly research-heavy. The details of everyday life are there to trip you up. Things that we take for granted, indeed, hardly think about, can lead to tremendous mistakes.

I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres - the fiction has to be real inside your head.

People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.

I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.

When the first book out my sister-in-law read it and we were chatting at 5 o'clock in the afternoon and she said, "Oh my God, chapter six, sex and a murder," and her five year old wandered into the kitchen and said, "Sixty hamburgers?

All those kisses. There must have been a thousand. They engulfed me like some kind of all consuming dream where I became very alive and very relaxed at the same time.

Such a night cannot be shaken from a woman__ memory. Such a night changes your life forever.

We had laid down the law : no chocolate, no sex.

Sometimes you don__ even have to have sex at all, and for that kind of sicko, you charge double.

What was it that marked me as a woman and was I prepared to let it go?

She wishes her grandmother had not been so protective, and that she understood better what passes between a man and woman. As it is, she simply enjoys the feelings and wonders if they are what lightning is made of, for everything comes back to the weather. Tears like rain. Smiles like the sun. Hair as dry as sand and fear like the dark ocean.

Kissing her is like drinking salted water, he thinks. His thirst only increases.

It occurred to me that as a man I could do anything, everything I wanted.

His heart is pounding and when he kisses her it is as if the whole of Riyadh disappears _ the wide sky, the hard surface of the roof, the date palms and the water wells.

He tasted of whisky and his skin was rough where he hadn__ shaved, but Mirabelle kissed him back.