Start with short stories. After all, if you were taking up rock climbing, you wouldn't start with Mount Everest. So if you're starting fantasy, don't start with a nine-book series.
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.
