A: This is exciting. After 24 years of Social Work, working with troubled families, I am at last taking early retirement to pursue a full time writing career. It's a time I never thought would come, and at last it's here. I'll also have more time with my family, time for housework and gardening, and will at last take that trip to England I've wanted forever.

Q: What person has had the biggest effect on your life as a writer, and why?

A: Two people. My father, for all his foibles, was an inveterate experimenter. He taught me there is no such thing as failure, unless one doesn't try in the first place.

And my friend Jan, who read everything I wrote and loved it all. She was a person who never gave up, despite five bouts of cancer. The hardest thing in her life was learning acceptance when she learned she could no longer win her fight. From her I learned never to give up, yet at the same time, to accept my own mortality and give the world over to those who follow me when my own time comes.

Q: How do you come up with the idea for a book? Once you have an idea, do you plot it out, fly by the seat of your pants, or what?

A: What if? It's always that question that starts my books. It's always an idea to explore, and in my historicals, it is often some quirk of history that affected the way people lived, or a universal problem that I can explore in a historical perspective. I love to watch people triumph over adversity, or over their own flaws. An idea usually unfolds slowly to me, and doesn't seem like much at first. But I must work it out all the way to the end. Then, as I write, watch my carefully laid plans be so ingeniously unraveled by the very characters I thought I knew so well.

Q: What one thing do you like the most about being a writer, and why? What do you like the least?

A: I love to write. I love to create a world full of people I come to know and watch their story unfold. It's the most exciting thing I have ever done in my life.

Two things I like least, sticking to a schedule and going through the steps necessary to sell a book. Once I thought writers just sit back and write their stories then send it off somewhere and a check comes back. I've aged a bit since then. Learned a few things.

Q: Do you ever use real people as the inspiration for characters in your books? If so, why do you choose those particular people?

A: Real people always inspire me, but they never become characters in my books. The closest I ever came to that was the heroine of Loki's Daughters, who had the same kind of stubbornness and intensely protective instinct as my friend Jan. Her strength was, in many ways, her weakness. Her very courage and determination to save her people deprived her of her own humanness. But like Jan, she found in herself the strength to grow.

Q: If you include love scenes in your books, are they difficult for you to write? How do you decide whether to include a love scene at that point in the book, and if so, how explicit to make it?

A: Love scenes are very hard. They have specific characteristics that must be fulfilled or they don't work. They must be unique to each story, yet making them unique is an immense challenge. I have problems with a story feeling "ended" when the love scene is finished.

But I finally realized a love scene is not about the mechanics of lovemaking. It's about the emotional involvement and commitment. And if the story has not been finished, then it is vital that some conflicting issue remain unresolved by the love scene. Since I figured that out, the scenes have had much better direction.

Q: Out of all the characters you've created, which is your favorite, and why?

A: Lord Savoury in Lady Wicked (unpublished) is my favorite hero. He's sexy and rakish, and a terrible tease who loves picking on the heroine. Yet beneath his unresolved aimlessness is unrecognized compassion. He's forever taking in strays. Anyone who needs help, he can't turn down.

Melisande in Fire Dance is my favorite heroine. She's gutsy, strong, and intelligent. But she has no sense of humor. She's not dour or mean. She simply doesn't get it. She takes everything everyone says at literal value.

Q: What traits do you like or dislike in a hero or heroine?

A: There's a certain kind of dumbness that infects us all in some way or other, and a character becomes endearing when he has flaws. But I cannot stand cruelty, stupidity, or abject immaturity in a hero or heroine. A hero may be arrogant, but never brutal. Abuse is ugly and does not belong to my heroes and heroines.

Q: Is any one of your books the book of your heart, a book you felt compelled to write? Tell us about it.

A: They all are. It's the only way I can write a book. Every one of them burnt its way through my soul to the paper.

Q: What's your current writing project? How did you come up with the idea?

A: Aphrodite's Brew is in the process of changing from a traditional Regency to a short historical. Although I've always tried to write with humor, this story is much lighter than most of my stories. Yet it still has that underlying tragic issue that is characteristic of all my stories.

What was meant to be a restorative tonic for women turns out to have an entirely different effect on men. And the bachelors of the Ton are running scared. Two people who have sworn never to love are swept into an inexplicable whirl of unbridled passion. And somewhere from the mists of time, a forgotten god is laughing.