A: I am a terrible recluse. Possibly this is because, although I love people, I am the only person I really feel comfortable talking to for long periods of time. When I'm not writing, I'm trying to turn our little, teeny rural acreage into a self-sufficient farm with a little orchard, garden and chickens and rabbits for meat and eggs (the chickens not the rabbits; rabbits hardly ever lay eggs).

Q: What made you start writing and when did you start?

A: I started writing almost as soon as I could read--which was very, very young. Thank goodness my parents valued books. That was the one thing they almost always scraped up money for. However, every once in a while, they would insist on buying me unimportant things like clothes and food instead, so I was forced to write my own books. My first story was a domestic page-turner about a "blak hors" who had a baby. It had everything I looked for in a story (spelling did not become a priority until I was at least six).

Q: Who are some of your favorite authors?

A: J.R.R. Tolkien. I had always loved mythology and fairy tales, the Grim-er the better, but The Lord of the Rings combined the two in such a way that it took me a long time to get my mind around the idea that the story wasn't real.

In fact, for the longest time, I had a sort of picture in my head of stories being captured out of the ether and printed on paper by some kind of magical machine. One day in Waldenbooks, I saw DragonQuest, the sequel to DragonFlight (which I had reread three times in one week), and saw the name Anne McCaffery in huge, bold letters bigger than the title. Frowning, I ran my fingers over the name, compared it to the same name at the top of DragonFlight. Could it possibly be, I wondered, that these books were actually written by someone named Anne McCaffery? I scanned the shelves and began to see a pattern. That was probably when I realized my own story scribbling wasn't just something to give me the sensation of reading when there were no "real" books to be had. If that seems unusually simpleminded, you have to remember I was eleven when I first read The Lord of the Rings and twelve when I discovered DragonFlight.

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

A: My father was terrific about giving me praise and approval any time I wrote anything, and that kind of encouragement keeps a writer coming back to the grindstone every day. My husband and friends fulfill that role for me now.

My mother, though, probably had the most impact on my sense of professionalism. I joke that my mother would rather eat her own head than praise me to my face. Her way of showing approval was to critique. I intuitively understood that as evidence of respect. One day she read the final draft of one of my novels. The only thing she said was, "What are you doing about finding a publisher?"

I'm perennially starved for readers who have the guts to push me the way my mother did. They're hard to find.

Q: What type of books do you write? Is there a reason you write (for instance) historical romance rather than science fiction?

A: I once was asked by Ursula Hegi why I wanted to write "that escapist stuff." If you don't know who Ursula Hegi is, she's a terrific literary writer. Her latest book was featured in Oprah's book club. I, on the other hand, was writing a sci-fi romance for my Master's thesis at the time (It was awful. I could actually be blackmailed if that document is ever unearthed). Fortunately, Ursula was not my thesis advisor.

(My thesis committee turned out to be three men, one of whom was drafted from the physics department. He kept suggesting that maybe I should conduct some kind of poll to find out what people actually wanted to read.)

Anyway, the question was a little like being asked if I'd stopped kicking my dog yet. Rather than challenging the assumption that anything entertaining is "escapist," or that escapism is infantile, I smiled and said, "Because I enjoy it."

I could have said, "Because this is the genre I dream in," but that would have sounded pompous.

I don't remember exactly when I started dreaming in science-fiction, but even when I am not reading much SF, I still fight space-pirates and explore strange new worlds in my sleep. And I don't dream intellectual, literary Joanna Russ The Female Man sci-fi, either. I dream about heroes and villains and epic quests. I don't believe dreams are either entertainment or escapism. People deprived of R.E.M. sleep die. Whatever our brains do when we dream, it is crucial to our survival. I genuinely think that fiction does for us much the same thing our dreams do.

My Regency romance books were written when I was unemployed right after graduate school. I figured I had spent three years and thousands of dollars on a Master's degree in Creative Writing, and I had better be writing something. I was on a Regency reading binge at the time, and it seemed perfectly natural to write a Regency romance, a fluffy comedy of manners sort of thing. I was halfway through writing Honoria when I had the idea for Lady Fred which became a trilogy. Midway through that, the death of a distant relative lent itself to a plot for The Lady and the Lawyer. By the time I was halfway through Drake's Folly, the second in the Lady Fred series, I also had a detailed outline for Strangers, and was so anxious to get to it, I was writing 3000 words/day. I finished the third Lady Fred novel, The Scandal, in five weeks, then wrote The Lady and the Lawyer in fifteen days--5000 words/day. I don't actually recommend that. Holy cow was I tired.

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: I often dream in concise, vivid stories complete with settings, characters, clearly-defined conflicts, themes and storylines. Occasionally, I even dream that I am reading or writing the story as I dream it. Strangers and Skin both started as very vivid and emotionally-charged dreams, and I have a large file of story ideas from the same source. The more I am immersed in writing, the more ideas crowd in on me--which is why I recommend to people who want to write that they start writing. Anything. Even if it's terrible. Write a potboiler, pornography, it doesn't matter. Don't wait for the great American novel to come to you. If you're not writing, it's not coming.

Since I know the whole story to begin with, I am most comfortable working with an outline. It keeps me from writing myself into corners. Also, knowing exactly what I will be working on each day relieves a lot of anxiety; I can just sit down and write. I know people who say the outline takes the mystery and discovery out of the writing, but I find it frees me to explore details of character and setting that enhance my understand of the story. Then again, I'm one of those people who enjoy a story more when they know how it will end.

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: Many of my characters are born more or less fully-formed out of dreams and are therefore reflections of some facet of myself, but sometimes I'm captivated by a character trait I see in someone else. I've most often used real people as models for the villains in my books because I have difficult time creating villains; it's a struggle to make them more believable than cardboard cutouts. I hope that is because I am not very villainous myself.

Once my current project--a sequel to Skin--is done, I would like to write a romantic suspense novel about a woman trying to protect her mentally handicapped sister from a serial murderer targeting handicapped women. The character of the handicapped girl is based on a young woman of my acquaintance who has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. One of the most frustrating problems for the family and caretakers of the mentally handicapped is protecting them from (human) predators without robbing them of their freedom.

I want to tell a story about the reality of loving a handicapped person. To me this means loving the real person, warts and all, not the saccharine, romanticized version promoted by the mavens of political correctness.

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: I do find love scenes hard to write--not so much the actual writing as the sense of intruding on the privacy of the characters. I have been on a romantic suspense reading binge lately, plowing through authors like Nora Roberts, Jayne Ann Krentz and Catherine Coulter, but I often find that I skim over the love scenes because it isn't the part of the story that is most important to me.

However, I think that in fiction, especially women's fiction, love scenes often aren't so much about sex as they are about integration and transformation. A character confronted by a crisis needs to change before she can solve the problem. She needs to take into herself some powerful trait she has suppressed or ignored because it seemed dangerous or overpowering. In male fiction, this dangerous trait, or shadow-self, often takes the form of a father, brother or mentor. The hero has to walk a narrow line to defeat his shadow without becoming him.

Women often project the shadow-self as a male--dangerous, because our darker selves can be destructive, and fascinating because we need to be a little dangerous to survive. By taking the (male) shadow into herself, the heroine acquires the power she needs to save herself.

In terms of how explicit to be, sometimes how a character makes love is crucial to who that character is and who she is becoming. In Strangers, for example, the three P.O.V. characters each had to change in a different way. Annia had to let down her guard enough to let someone reach her. Liam, an engineered soldier, had to decipher the difference between love and violence. Tora, a commander down to her bones, naturally dominated the whole event. When writing Strangers, I felt strongly that to shy away from those details would be to cheat the characters.

Consequently, I sometimes have to gird up my loins, choke back my embarrassment and hire a gay man to type in the shameful words for me.

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

A: Just one? Tora, the clone soldier from Strangers, was a lot of fun. She was tough--all guts and muscle--and she was so painfully oblivious to (and offended by) her own evident humanity. Maycee from Strangers was a delightful character, too. She gave me an outlet for my smartass sense of humor in what could otherwise have been a painfully solemn story. It wasn't until years after the story was written and published that I realized how much of Maycee's humor was driven by her terror. Not that I subscribe to the characters-taking-on-a-life-of-their-own perspective. It's just that Maycee was one of those characters who sprang full-formed from a dream. I wrote her the way I knew her without consciously analyzing her.

Emma Sloan from Skin lacks the audacity I like so much in Tora and Maycee. I picture Emma in shades of taupe. But her predicament embodies the fear that if our true selves were exposed, we would be hideous. I love that she refuses to let her skin define her.

Still, if I had to pick just one character, it would have to be Lady Winnifred Westerly from the Lady Fred series coming soon from Awe-Struck. Freddy evolved out of a family reunion with my father's side of the family. I take after my mother's dyslexic family and am consequently notorious for conversational oddities which my father's very literal and linear family have trouble following (at my mother's family reunions, I am considered perfectly normal).

The contrast set me thinking about a character who can't dissemble and invariably says exactly the wrong thing. That was Lady Fred. More than any other character, she seemed to express my own sense of being out of step with the rest of the world and unable to figure out exactly why or how.

Q: Do you ever suffer from writer's block? Have you found any effective ways for dealing with it?

A: I am one of those obnoxious jerks who adamantly deny the existence of writer's block. I have never experienced it. It's not that I don't go through long, miserable dry spells in which I am unable to write anything. I do, but I don't call it writer's block. For one thing, the concept of writer's block is romantic and colorful whereas I am not. For another, my dry spells are part of a general chronic fatigue that affects everything in my life, so it's more like a bad case of getting-out-of-bed block. Therefore, when I can't get my mind to focus enough to write, I call it a Major Medical Emergency, and I expect my family doctor to Do Something.

I'm convinced my most important writing tool is my bicycle. Health permitting, I ride every day--rain, sleet and dark of night notwithstanding (I once tried to ride in ten inches of snow, but that turned out to be a bad idea). There is something about the combination of endorphins and bilateral movement that seems to stimulate me in exactly the right way. Plus, after sitting in a chair for eight hours straight, I'm dying to get out and move.