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" I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium. "

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" The money can be decent, but I really don't recommend the work-for-hire route as an entry into publishing. Too many things can go wrong. "

" Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy. "

" My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history. "

" I write sets of books, but I've also written a lot of orphans. "

" One of my great passions is the collection of historical trivia. "

" For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel. "

" Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured. "

" I'm always trolling for trivia. "

" Editors of open anthologies actively seek submissions from all comers, established and unknown. They are willing to read whatever the tide washes up at their feet. "

" It's been a long time since I've written old-fashioned sword and sorcery; I'm hoping it's like riding a bicycle. "

" That bedrock faith that I could write was what blinded me to attempts to discourage me. "

" I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath. "

" It's possible to become so comfortable with one's style and structure that one ceases to grow. "

" I'm a writer first and an editor second... or maybe third or even fourth. Successful editing requires a very specific set of skills, and I don't claim to have all of them at my command. "

" It took me about 12 years to reach my million-word mark. The challenge now is to continue to challenge myself. "

" No one uses a ribbon typewriter any more, but your final draft is not the time to try to wring a few more sheets out of your inkjet cartridge. "

" Ideas aren't magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down. "

" If you write, one of the questions you're always trying to answer is, Where do you get your ideas? And, if you write, you know how pointless a question this is and how difficult it is to answer. "

" When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat. "

" There is nothing that compares to an unexpected round of applause. "

" I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's god-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books. "

" A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story. "

" I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I've never been able to sell. I'm known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre. "

" I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published. "

" When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery. "

" Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment. "

" I'm dense when it comes to discouragement. "