If an idea doesn't move me enough for me to spend a year with it, it's not worth writing about.

I start with characters and conflict, and finally a first chapter. That probably takes as long as writing the rest of the book. My characters tell me what they're going to do, and I'm sorry if that sounds weird.

I lived in China for six years, Thailand for five, and Vietnam for one. When I got home in 2011, I raided the local library like a beast. Once I finally exhausted that resource, I bought a Kindle. I love it.

Word of mouth, which might explain why I'm still broke.

I can write anywhere, literally, and I have stories that are sure to bore you. My desk is pristine except for the computer, because I need plenty of room for the cat to roll around. Don't look at the table beside the desk, though, or in the drawers. They're a wreck.

I grew up in rural North Carolina. Imagine a list of east coast towns you've never heard of, throw a dozen darts, and assume I lived in at least one of them for at least a year. I'm currently in Durham and need to visit Roxboro more, since that's where my mother's family lives.

But really, how could where a person grew up NOT influence his or her writing. I grew up in a long oral storytelling tradition, though, and I've been told that writing dialogue is one of my strengths, so there's probably a correlation.

Age 9, 1972, I wrote my own comic books and told them to the neighborhood kids. They were popular, but let's all be grateful they were never published. I guess we'll say I "got serious" about it when I was included in the 1982 Who's Who in American Writing.

I retired from writing fiction again. Three years later, a passage in Incognito: The Secret Life of the Brain by David Eagleman made me stop reading just long enough to realize, "Oh crap, I could build a novel on this." My longest retirement was ten years, and I've probably retired more than Brett Favre, but seriously, I'm retired now. You kids get off my lawn.

(Seriously, a book idea that can't do that to you won't motivate you through what it takes to write the thing.)

I rarely write in the same genre twice. I switch from book to book, and sometimes within the course of a single book. I've always been aware that large presses don't know how to market me. I started with small presses that provided free editing, which I desperately needed. (Every author needs editing. There are no exceptions.) But as those publishers have gone out of business, I've reissued those old titles, fully edited and looking good. I like being able to control all the business-y aspects of being an author.

My short story anthology has led to many people telling me "it changed my life." That's why I write, but why then had I only sold 50 copies? On Smashwords, I changed the title one day, and over 10,000 people downloaded it in a single week. Thank you Smashwords! That was information I needed.

Ask any author. There's a feeling we get when we're writing something and it's all just working. The zone, the flow, the whatever. A lot of the writing process itself, to be honest, is grunt work. That other stuff is why I write. Oh, and the aforementioned "you changed my life" emails are nice. I originally became a writer to change lives.

Shonda Rhimes taught me how to accept a compliment. Say thank you, smile, and shut up. In person, if you want to talk about my writing, I want to change the subject. But I do appreciate every fan. You write what you'd like to read, and people with similar tastes find what you've done and appreciate it. Given that, having absolutely no fans at all would probably suck.

I started my editing and proofreading business in December 1999. I started teaching myself to play piano in July 2014. That's what I'm working on. I really do want to stay retired this time. You kids get off my lawn.