I spent two months on the first draft, working 8 hours a day, five days a week.

In the first year, 1988, I wrote and sold 3 novels.

I've been reading horror since I was five years old.

During that first year, I felt guilty that my wife was out working bringing in all our income, while I was at home playing on the computer, so I made myself treat writing like a job.

I got up with my wife, I sat down at the computer when she went to work, and I didn't stop until she got home.

I've devoted a lot of my time and effort during the past few years to developing my advertising copywriting business to the point of where I can support my family and don't have to depend on writing fiction for my income.

Even the contemporary horror authors who have seriously influenced me are a disparate bunch.

I'm a fan of short horror fiction... in fact, the most memorable horror I've read is of the short variety... but I have a hard time pulling it off myself.

When I decided to take writing seriously, I did a lot of reading and analyzing of the books I liked, and came up with what I thought were pretty sound plotting and structure basics.

Actually, the 14 novels were written over a period of just over 6 years.

For each book, the time is also broken up.

For the novels I wrote before selling anything, I didn't outline much. I had a vague idea of the story.

I spent two months on the first draft, working 8 hours a day, five days a week.

Trying to break into the horror market seemed natural.

The way I outline has changed quite a bit from when I first started writing.

On the other hand, now that I'm not dependent on fiction for my income, I've been writing more short stories despite the fact that there's no real paying market for short horror other than Cemetery Dance.

The benefit of this kind of outlining is that you discover a story's flaws before you invest a lot of time writing the first draft, and it's almost impossible to get stuck at a difficult chapter, because you've already done the work to push through those kinds of blocks.

A couple of weeks after that, Zebra Books phoned with an offer, and I accepted.

When I was a teenager, I got into SF, quite heavily, and that too has had a major impact on my writing.

So, in effect, my first sale was actually two books.

Many of my short stories (all unpublished) were horror, and the novel I'd just finished was horror, too.

So, I outlined a horror novel and started writing.

I did work out every day. I needed it to have the endurance to do what needed to be done and not get hurt. I have such a new respect for action stars now.

I mean the only thing that is hopefully good about us is after the arguments we can actually still face each other the next day or the day after and talk about something else and sort of get over it.

My favorite singer to this day is Nat King Cole. I've tried to emulate his phrasing. It is so absolutely beautiful to listen to his lovely voice.

I want to have babies one day but not right now. When I do it I want to do it really well. I want it to be my best project in life.

I think I've become a much better singer and a much better player. Years and years of playing a couple of hours every day will do that.

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

I just wrote one song at a time. Kinda like an alcoholic. One day at a time.

Working mothers do an hour more per day than working fathers do and working mothers do on average an hour more per day with the kids than working fathers do.

When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day.

George Pal had total control, and he was there on the set every day. You never met a more charming man in your entire lifetime - what a lovely gentleman.

I'll tell you what I did need to learn was tolerance, and I think I've been actually given a daily opportunity to practice that, and it's - it's - and I know that that sounds almost like a backhanded slap, and it is in a way because I haven't been successful at it every day.

Since the beginning, I always loved the game. When you grow up in Montreal, one day you want to be a professional hockey player. When I was six or seven, I knew that was what I wanted.

Depending on what day of the week it is and what time of the month it is, I'm a good friend or not a good friend. I'm more or less a good mom or not a good mom, more or less a good mate or not a good mate. That's just life, whether or not you're public.

Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.

A play is much easier to maintain your personal life with because if you're rehearsing, you're working like from 11 to 6 or 11 to 5 and you get to have your whole morning and your whole evening. When you're doing the play, you have all day.

I'd like to one day play Amanda, the mother, in The Glass Menagerie.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

I'm working harder than ever now, and I'm putting on my pants the same as I always have. I just get up every day and try to do a little better than the day before, and that is to run a great restaurant with great food, great wine, and great service. That's my philosophy.

Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.

The day cold and fair with a high easterly wind: we were visited by two Indians who gave us an account of the country and people near the Rocky mountains where they had been.

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.

The Pawnee chief had left the village the day after the doctor arrived, with 50 or 60 horses and many people, and had taken his course to the north of our route.

To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.

That music and the lyrical aspects of Razorblade Romance is so personal to me that, now with me being grown up a bit and meeting new people and doing new things, it makes me look at the same things I was writing about back in the day through a different colored lens.

The things in my songs are the edited highlights of my life. I don't go seeking out strange sexual experiences every day of the week.

People think how a sugar basin has no physiognomy, no soul. But it changes every day.

It's a very hard and competitive business in which you have to fight every day in order to impose yourself.