::: art directory
::: art advertising

+ If I'm not at my desk by 4AM I feel like I'm missing my most productive hours. In addition to starting early, I keep an antique hour glass on my desk and every hour break briefly to do pushups, sit ups, and some quick stretches. I find this helps keep the blood (and ideas) flowing.

+ I suppose discussing books in the classroom also helps me to analyze good fiction and incorporate similar themes into my own work.

+ In many ways, editing yourself is the most important part of being a novelist.. carving away superfluous text until your story stands crystal clear before your reader.

+ For every page in a published novel, I wrote ten that ended up in the trash.

+ The toughest part was believing in the story even when things were going badly.. forcing myself to spend 5 to 8 hours a day on the manuscript even when I wasn't positive I could make it work. I did make it work and I'm glad I stuck with it.

+ Writing an informative yet compact thriller is a lot like making maple sugar candy. You have to tap hundreds of trees.. boil vats and vats of raw sap.. evaporate the water.. and keep boiling until you've distilled a tiny nugget that encapsulates the essence. Of course, this requires liberal use of the "delete" key.

+ I am so busy writing I have almost no time to read anything other than non-fiction and research books.

+ The all-time best "gift book" has to be a leather-bound copy of the Oxford English Dictionary. How can you go wrong?

+ It's important for authors to use the Web responsibly. More than half the information out there is garbage. And it's important to realize that just because it's on the Web doesn't mean that it's a fact.