When my kids were all in school, and I was halfway through a software engineering career! I had never believed I could write a whole story, much less a story like those I loved reading. Then a friend teased me into exchanging letters with her “in character”. I was hooked on day 1. I was a late bloomer!

Of course I love good royalty checks, good reviews, and awards. But success is hearing from happy readers. Readers who say they reread all my books once a year. Or the time a young man came up to me at a convention autographing and told me that he wanted to thank me. He had pulled one of my books out of a box of donated books when he was serving in Afghanistan—a place he didn’t want to be—and that it made him look at his situation differently and get through his time there. And a young woman who wrote to me that one of my series helped her through a really tough time in her life, and another who said they made her start reading again. Stories like that are priceless.

Not any more. I took an early out from my software engineering career – which I liked very much – when I started writing under deadlines. I still miss those paychecks, but I don’t miss the work!

Anywhere between -1000 and +3000 words and all day (when I am in the middle of a book). Even the -1000 word days can be very successful days, because it usually means I’ve figured out where something went astray and I’ve fixed it.

Dick Francis, Jane Austen, Ellen Kushner, Roger Zelazny, Robin Hobb, Tony Hillerman, Charles Dickens… Many.

All of them together. I didn’t leave the state of Texas until I was 19. There was no internet, no Google. We had no TV until I was 12. All my adventures and travel and encounters with people unlike those I knew were from books – mostly fiction! Even as the other things came into my life, I always ranged farther and deeper through stories. I would say that Lord of the Rings, though not my most favorite book, was powerfully influential, in that it transformed fantasy from the realm of Alice in Wonderland and Edith Hamilton mythology into a world that felt real, complete, and believable, and encompassed issues like courage and commitment, the costs of war, and the meaning of friendship. When eventually I did start writing, I wanted my very different stories to reflect that same completeness (no I did not create my own linguistics!!), believability, and depth.

Very little besides time and brain cells, because otherwise they would be totally boring! But, of course, it is impossible to keep my own opinions about what courage is, what truth is, and such like important considerations out of my stories. I do have one character in Daughter of Ancients who is good at math, bothered by heights, and very opinionated. She is probably the nearest to me of all my creations!

I call what I do organic story development. To me the word “pantser” implies that you sit down with a blank page with no end in mind except the end of the book. Instead of that, I start with a seed: a character, a setting, and an event in mind. I need to get the slave back to the prince’s house. I need to get the librarian into the king’s service to investigate a murder. I need Anne to see the place where her sister was found dead. Whatever. I have more or less knowledge of the world I’m in. (Certainly not all of it, even when I am writing sequels.) Then I start writing. As I write I set the event in motion and think – at that moment – how does this character react? What does that reaction tell me about that character? Who else is there and why? As I write the scene, I decide what else I need to include in this setting to make the scene more sensory. More vivid. And then, how do those details inform the world that includes the setting? Etc. Etc. That isn’t flying by the seat of your pants. That is growing new things from known things.

Extremely important. Many people believe that writing secondary world fantasy exempts you from research. Not true! If you want to make your story and your world believable, you have to make sure that the elements you choose, from geography and current technology, to food and transportation, to the logical underpinnings of magic fit together seamlessly. I’ve written my own versions of the Age of Reason, the Italian Renaissance, the 12th century, and other time periods. I use maps, herbals, science timelines, books about ships, about tidepools, about manuscript illumination, and ink making, and men’s societies of Florence. It’s all part of the fun. I believe that you can make anything happen in fantasy, but if you fail to build in logic, the reader will feel cheated.

I started out writing stories that I love and never found any reason to quit doing that. If I’m going to live with characters for a year or more and read their words dozens and dozens of times, I want to love them! Plus, I know I do better work on a book if it’s a story I am passionate about. Among the best things I can hear from a reader are, “I never read anything quite like your books” or “I had given up reading fantasy, until I read your work.”

Extra words. Lots of words. I tend to write descriptions and my protagonist’s musings very completely as I am figuring out where I am in the world and what exactly is going on. Once I have a good understanding of those things (ie. when I reach the end) I can strip out a lot of verbiage. My books range from 90K to 190K words in size. The most I ever stripped out from a finished manuscript was 23,000 words (but it was one of the longest of my books.) Sometimes I introduce plot threads that don’t end up going anywhere, so those are ripe for stripping, too. For A Summoning of Demons, I didn’t actually have to remove much of anything (except a few extra words). Almost all of my revisions were clarifications of what was there.

For Summoning, it was the climax. My heroine’s particular magical talent in the Chimera world is the ability to immerse herself in an impersonation so completely that she thinks and acts as that person. She is totally convincing. She has to build that character so that the actions she needs will flow from that persona. But still she tried to maintain a “presence” inside that persona so that she can be sure to influence her “character” in complex situations. Essentially there were multiple narrative streams that I had to keep clear to the reader during the climactic events: what the false character thinks and observes, what is actually happening around her, and what Romy herself is trying to accomplish…well it could easily be very confusing. But I think I managed it! We’ll see.

Strong, complex characters from the major to the minor. And the choice, rhythm, and flow of the words themselves. I think that most of them end up in a different place than the reader expects when starting out, but the endings are always hopeful.

The first book of the Chimera series was the story of how my little group of outlaw sorcerers got together and became the agents of their city’s strongman. The second was how a simple assignment from their employer led them into a dangerous conspiracy that took all their magical capabilities to unravel. And for this third one, I loved that I was able at last to explore some of the truths behind the mythology of the world – the mysteries that have caused the powers-that-be to try to eradicate sorcerers.

A Summoning of Demons is my eighteenth book. Most of my earlier titles were inspirations derived from the plot as I was writing the book or beginning the series. For some reason the first two Chimera series’ titles were a little harder. But after much gnashing of brains, trying to capture the heist/caper/adventure flavor of these books with the magical overtones – a genre a bit lighter than the epic/mythic character of my Carol Berg books – my editor came up with An Illusion of Thieves. I knew it was perfect when she suggested it. Tor is big on series title similarities, thus when my small group of magical spies got involved in an assassination plot, we came up with A Conjuring of Assassins. And I informed her that once I had gotten into the meat of book three A Summoning of Demons was the only possibility. After she read it, she agreed wholeheartedly.

I would like to think that it is a fun, absorbing adventure with great characters and some unexpected twists.

I spend my writing days designing demons and investigating all those topics I listed above. What could be more quirky than that?

Get more sleep.