I could write historical fiction, or science fiction, or a mystery but since I find it fascinating to research the clues of some little know period and develop a story based on that, I will probably continue to do it.

From the beginning, the series has been story driven - I began with a story idea - but research feeds it.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

Life sometimes gets in the way of writing.

It took some time to gather the research and develop it into the storyline, and to finally finish an origin myth poem that I had been working on for twenty years.

I have been a reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy for a long time, since I was 11 or 12 I think, so I understand it and I'm not at all surprised that readers of the genre might enjoy my books.

Aside from sales, the letters from readers have been primarily positive.

I had an idea for a story about a young woman who was living with people who were different, not just superficially different - such as hair colour, or eye colour, or skin colour - but different in some significant way.

I probably read 100 times more than I write, but that way when I move my characters through it, I know.

Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets, it is fiction based on science and I am using science as my basis for my fiction, but it's the science of prehistory - palaeontology and archaeology - rather than astronomy or physics.

From the beginning, when I first got an idea for a story and wondered if I could write it, it has always been the story that has driven me.

I can move my characters through it easily, because I understand the background; I've really studied it.

I have heard Science Fiction and Fantasy referred to as the fiction of ideas, and I like that definition, but it's the mainstream public that chooses my books for the most part.

I don't write for publishers, certainly not for critics, and not for readers, But I am delighted that so many people have found my books enjoyable and want to continue to read them.

Of the two, I would think of my work as closer to Science Fiction than Fantasy.

No, my publisher has always done the marketing.

I can't tell you any more than any other writer can tell you why they write, and I don't know what my influences are.

My fiction is reviewed by the mainstream press, by science fiction periodicals, romance magazines, small press publications and various other journals, including some usually devoted to archaeological and other science material.

Though my books are written from a historical perspective, I have goon so far back that I am in the realm of prehistorical speculation rather than simple historical fact to weave my stories around.

I could write historical fiction, or science fiction, or a mystery but since I find it fascinating to research the clues of some little know period and develop a story based on that, I will probably continue to do it.

The idea led me into the research, which continues to give me more ideas for the story.

Each book has been different and has been challenging in its own way to write.

I'm just writing a story that I want to read.

I started writing to please myself, a story I would like to read, and that is still true.

I really fell in love with Africa.

I think of my books as mainstream and that's were most people who read them look for them in book stores.

I don't really have special rituals, but I don't try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I'm truly concentrating.

The fact that it's science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.

For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.

We were given clear concrete tools. The course did a great job demystifying the art of fiction writing and fostering confidence. The instructor brought complex concepts down to earth. I will miss coming here every week.

The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time.

I have never been a critic of science fiction as a whole.

Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.

I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen.

I have always loved science fiction. One of my favorite shows is 'Star Trek.' I like the trips, where it drops my mind off, because they give you a premise and all of a sudden, you say, 'Oh!' and I'm fascinated by it.

I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.

For people who have no critical acumen, a state is a mythical entity, for those who think critically it is a rational fiction, created by man in order to facilitate human coexistence.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

For the last 30 years our cinemas have been ruled by science fiction and horror. We've had some very good Fantasy films in that time period, but for my tastes I still haven't seen fantasy done to absolute perfection. That is the hope I have in this project.

I dig science fiction, though it was never really my thing.

I have a kind of standard explanation why, which goes like this: Science fiction is one way of making sense out of a senseless world.

I'm not a great science fiction fan myself. I probably feel that way about Westerns. Like I used to play Cowboys and Indians, they can act out Will and the Robot.

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.

In fiction, you have a rough idea what's coming up next - sometimes you even make a little outline - but in fact you don't know. Each day is a whole new - and for me, a very invigorating - experience.