I read a little of everything: fantasy and science fiction, of course, but also some mystery, literary, historical, and mainstream fiction, and nonfiction in various subjects. As in my day job - as a reference librarian - I'm more of a generalist than a specialist. I may not be able to give you an in-depth discussion of every major fantasy novel published last year, but I can tell you a little about a lot of things. (I've started using Goodreads to track what I'm reading - look me up there to see more!)

It's hard to answer this without putting my librarian hat back on, because e-readers and e-books are a topic of such debate in the library world. E-readers are just a tool. Use whichever one works for you, given the situation. I keep a book or two on my Android phone at all times, either in Kindle or Overdrive Media Console, so that I'm never stuck waiting in, for example, a doctor's office without anything to read. If I'm going on vacation, I'll pack my Kobo for long afternoons with a book. If I need to annotate anything, I'll use my old Sony touchscreen. And if I just saw something that caught my interest, it'll probably be in good old paper format.

IKEA. Yes, I'm one of those people. My laptop is in the middle, an area I try to keep clear. Behind it is a shelf of reference material: dictionaries, a reverse dictionary (a very cool resource), a book of first names for inspiration, something called English Through the Ages (useful for historical work), and a thesaurus (which should be considered dangerous and used only in case of emergencies). The top shelf is lined with notebooks containing printouts of my books, since I like to have the hardcopy to flip through for quick reference. Some of the printouts are heavily copyedited and now unreadable. A few of the notebooks contain - seriously! - handwritten originals, since that's how I used to write until I sold "Confidence Game." The contract said I had a year to write a sequel, and that's when I decided to learn how to type.

I was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona. It should not be surprising that deserts and hot weather make a frequent appearance in my books. However, cold weather and the sea also intrigue me, in part because they're so unfamiliar to me.

I like to say that my kindergarten teacher put that fat pencil in my tiny little hand and I never put it down, although I might be misremembering my age. One clear memory I have is of the paper they gave us to practice our writing: it was blank on the top half and ruled on the bottom half, and we were encouraged to draw a picture in the top half and write a story about it. I always ran out of ruled paper and had to ask for more. I wrote copiously - but not necessarily *well* - until my junior year in high school, when my English teacher introduced us to stream of consciousness. That's when I started thinking about a character's internal development, as well as style and theme. Trying to get published seemed like a natural progression, but I didn't actually work on that until my 20s.

Not just one story, but a mashup of things. I got started reading Patrick O'Brian's sea stories at the same time as I was reading about the history of medicine. I was also reading about Muslim cultures. I also had a character lurking in my brain who felt everything very deeply, to the point that he was almost bipolar. I was also contemplating the theme of rape in fiction, especially in the "rape and revenge" stories that used to appear often in fantasy. I was also watching the TV show Becker. I suddenly had a vivid scene in my head where a cranky female physician was having an argument with a ship's surgeon at a Patrick O'Brian-style captain's dinner, defending her practice of serving women in a Muslim community. Soon the scene transported itself to a fantasy setting, the religions changed considerably, the bipolar character and the vengeful victim crept in, and a story emerged.

My story is somewhat the reverse of those you see so often today, where an indie author is discovered by New York and gets a big book deal. I published three books with a New York publisher, but because the sales weren't strong enough for them, they never called back. I'm afraid this is a more common story in today's market, if not as well-publicized. However, as a fellow traditional-to-indie author says, we can now write what we want, when we want. That's a freedom that writers can really appreciate.