The Sookie Stackhouse novels were selling well before the TV show, but the TV show led to a lot more exposure and readers. And a lot went on to read my other work. It was a wonderful thing for my bank account.
I bought a selection of short, romantic fiction novels, studied them, decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected.
People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible.
For novelists, the imagination is everything. The trick is to guide one's imagination using research. I love using old maps. When I wrote my novels on London and New York, I found wonderful historical atlases. Paris has the most lavish maps of all.
At one point I intended to write precursor and sequel novels, about the establishment of the Web and its next evolution, but I am very unlikely to now; they would take place in a different universe.
My 'Rot & Ruin' series is a post-apocalyptic adventure for teens. My 'Joe Ledger' novels are science-based action thrillers for adults. My 'Dead of Night' stories are zombie tales for adults; my 'Pine Deep Trilogy' is classic horror for adults, and I've written nonfiction books on topics ranging from martial arts to folklore.
I think novels are profoundly autobiographical. If writers deny that, they are lying. Or if it's really true, then I think it's a mistake.
I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.
Of course the 19th century remained in blissful ignorance of post-modern irony, and the dime novels were made without end.
Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.
The Florida in my novels is not as seedy as the real Florida. It's hard to stay ahead of the curve. Every time I write a scene that I think is the sickest thing I have ever dreamed up, it is surpassed by something that happens in real life.
In the past, it was only in science fiction novels that you could read about ordinary people being able to go to space... But you laid the foundation for space tourism.
I write the kinds of novels I like to read, where the setting is rendered with love and care.
I didn't want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be.
I was incredibly determined - I wrote short stories, I wrote the beginnings of novels. I wrote a little children's book and sent it to the editor-in-chief of the children's division of Simon and Schuster and she asked me to write a little children's book for a series she was doing.
Many of my works fall into the category of 'Zeitgeist novels'. Yet I hope that they aren't only reportage, but also attempts to convey the sense of the present to the future.
I'm not sure how writers and artists of other graphic novels join forces, but this is how the process worked for me: First, I produced my final script. Then, Mark Siegel, my editor at First Second, assembled information about 10 or 12 different artists and had me look through their portfolios to see what kind of styles appealed to me.
All my novels are about the ambiguities that lie beneath the sharp edges of the law.
Call me territorial or narcissistic, but I avoid novels about people who share my vocation.
I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.
I don't think you can write novels on the road. You need a certain stability.
I especially don't like the graphic violence against women and children often depicted in novels such as 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' and others. I'm not sure if it's being done just to entertain or whether it really is necessary for the characters involved.
Obviously, there are those in the industry who don't give romance novels the level of respect the sales would warrant. They'll talk about a book that sells maybe 100,000 copies, that happens to be very literary, whereas something like 'Crossfire' will sell 13 million copies in a single language and hardly get any mentions at all.
I spend so long writing each of my novels that by the time I'm done with one, I'm ready to discover a totally different world.
I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?
I really love to make sweeping historical gestures that are like little illustrations of novels.
I chose a time in the century which had the greatest moments for novels - the late '30s and World War II.
The rise of the dramas in the thirteenth century, and the rise of the great novels in a later period, together with their frank glorification of love and the joys of life, may be called the Third Renaissance.
I also read modern novels - I have just had to read 60 as I am one of the judges for the Orange Fiction Prize.
They say great themes make great novels. but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.
When you're 14, anything with a sword and a dragon is pretty cool. But when you're 21 and you've read 2,000 fantasy novels, you start to realize that some of those books, well, they weren't really good. OK, let's be honest. A lot of them were crap.
Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.
I do not use profanity in my novels. My characters all go to church.
Each of my novels has come from a different place, and the processes are not always entirely conscious. I have lived off and on in America for a number of years and so have accumulated observations, found things interesting, been moved to tell stories about them.
I knew I wanted to write novels, but I could not finish what I started. The closer I got, the more ways I'd find to screw it up.
I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows.
