I'm a huge fan of Tolkien. I read those books when I was in junior high school and high school, and they had a profound effect on me. I'd read other fantasy before, but none of them that I loved like Tolkien.
I have idea files of books that I want to write one of these days, stories I want to write one of these days, but I'll probably never get to them.
I have an instinctual distrust of conventional happy endings.
It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.
One of the things I love, and I'm a voracious reader as well as a writer, is books that surprise me, that are not predictable.
I write from this tight third-person viewpoint, where each chapter is seen through the eyes of one individual character. When I'm writing that character, I become that character and identify with that character.
