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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.
That bedrock faith that I could write was what blinded me to attempts to discourage me.
I write sets of books, but I've also written a lot of orphans.