I like to call my budding writing career a "Menopausal Epiphany." I had not written a single creative word (other than school and college essays) until I hit 50 -- a landmark year that brought home the ravages of menopause and then some. Fighting Mother Nature was a losing battle, so I decided to put those yo-yoing hormones to creative use instead. Continue reading...

"That is so totally cool!" There was no one in the room but I was hearing a voice. Not deep but definitely a man's voice. With something. A timbre of breathlessness? Joy maybe? That's what it was. Joy. It's not that I commonly hear things. Well, maybe I do. I'm a writer after all. But this voice was persistent. I didn't know who he was yet or where he came from. I only knew one thing. He was probably going to be a character in my next book. Continue reading...

One of the first questions I'm asked when people find out I've published a novel is, "How long did it take you to write it?" When I tell them it took about 17 years, I watch their jaws drop and after the look of shock dissipates, I know they're expecting me to have produced a masterpiece along the lines of War and Peace or Remembrance of Things Past. They can't imagine how it could have taken me all those years to write a semi-autobiographical, coming of age story. How could that be? Well... Continue reading...

I am obsessed, to say the least, with rude behavior. My kids beg me to ignore it, my husband thinks I'll get shot one day. I have, sometimes, gone too far, and have been rude myself in the quest for justice. But, for some reason, I think it is my duty, my calling, to rid the world of rudeness, one annoying person at a time. Like people who talk on their cell phones at the movies, or who clip their nails in public, or who don't say "thanks" when you hold a door open for them, or who cut in line. Continue reading...

The Triangle shirtwaist factory fire of 1911 was always a source of morbid fascination for me when I was a child growing up in New York City. My father's mother had worked at the Triangle Waist Company in 1909, finishing buttonholes, and while she had left the sweatshop more than a year before the notorious fire that claimed some 150 lives (to marry and give birth to my father in the back of a grocery store in Brooklyn), that fire felt like an event in my family history. She could have died in the fire. Continue reading...

I have a nephew called Robert. About three years ago, when Robert was still quite small, I was in his bedroom with my husband Peter, and Robert's dad. As we were talking, my husband picked up Robert's Professor Gangrene doll, which had a particularly revolting, greenish face. And when my husband heard the doll's name, he said, "What I want to know is, where do all these criminal masterminds get their degrees from?" Whereupon Robert's dad immediately replied: "From the university of Evil."

Immediately, my antennae went up. That's how most writers work: we often get our best ideas from conversations like this.

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How much research did you have to do before writing your book? That's one of the questions you'll hear most often if you've just published an international thriller. Implicit is the assumption all that research had to be done before the story was written, yet in reality the writing process was never that linear, especially for a first-time author. Continue reading...