fiction

Picture time travel as nothing more than knocking your half-read book to the floor and losing your place. You pick up the book and open the pages to a scene too early or late, but never exactly where you__ been reading.

I refuse to live in a constant fighting match, Landon. It will not do!' 'And I__e tried living without you, and it just won__ do!

The best historical stories capture the modern imagination because they are, in many senses, still current - part of a continuum.

Our pendants glowed in unison and I understood that they represented us _ Siren and human intertwined for eternity.

Does bad luck come in 3's...or is it multiples of 3?

It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world, and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are.

Somebody will beat both [contents and price] sooner or later because that is good old Free Enterprise, where the consumer benefits from battles between jolly green giants.

Aging and the prospect of dying by no means enhance the attractiveness of fictitious comforts to come in paradise, or the veracity of malicious myths about hellfire and damnation. Fear and feeblemindedness cannot be credibly pressed into service to support fantastic claims about the cosmos and our ultimate destiny.Whether one would even consider turning to religion in advanced years has much to do with upbringing, which makes all the more important standing up to the presumptions of the religious in front of children. One would regard the Biblical events _ a spontaneously igniting bush, a sea__ parting, human parthenogenesis, a resurrected prophet and so on _ that supposedly heralded God__ intervention in our affairs as the stuff of fairy tales were it not for the credibility we unwittingly lend them by keeping quiet out of mistaken notions of propriety.

I did not want to set my world alight, to watch it burn because of the sister I had come to love too much.

How charming. The king and his little princess knocking on my covens door._ Ursula sighed dramatically. __hat do you insolent merfolks want with me now? I swear I haven__ eaten any of your children._-Ursula

It is not my job to explain the story or understand the story or reduce it to a phrase or offer it as being a story about any specific person, place, or thing. My job is to have been true enough to the world of my story that I was able to present it as a forceful and convincing drama. Every story is a kind of puzzle. Many have obvious solutions, and some have no solution at all. We write to present questions, sometimes complicated questions, not to offer easy or not-so-easy answers. Do not be misled by the limited vocabulary the American marketplace uses to describe the possibilities for story and drama. If we__e really writing we are exploring the unnamed emotional facets of the human heart. Not all emotions, not all states of mind have been named. Nor are all the names we have been given always accurate. The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live. No good guys, no bad guys, just guys: that is, people bearing up the crucible of their days and certainly not always__f ever__apable of articulating their condition.

Archive material is vital to the writer of historical fiction.

Live in your dreams, not your past.

I long for some connection, to the real and those who love them, and hope that my fiction can reach beyond the veil, that I might touch someone and make them feel something_or something.

Don't forget to wind the restricted clock and put the confidential cat out.

Truth has a resonance to it that fills the cracks where falsehoods lie.

Write about the thing that scares you most or your most private confession and you'll never have a problem coming up with decent fiction.

Faction is that hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration.