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The whole 'Melrose' series is an attempt to tell the truth, and is based on the idea that there is some salutary or liberating power in telling the truth.

A few years after 'Melrose Place,' when the luster of 'Melrose Place' wore off and what was left was just the stink, and I was just doing bad TV movies, that was a personal low point. I felt I needed to stop doing those, and I did.

There's more fiction in my life than in books, so I don't bother with them.

I've read all the 'Game of Thrones' books many times over, so I sometimes find it easier being on set, because it can be hard to get out of character.

I'm not one of these 'the characters write themselves; the story just fell out of me' kind of writers. Wish it was like that.

The constraints of melodrama can be a great blessing, because they demand that all the characters involved - as absurd and extreme as they may initially seem - must stay utterly rooted in their own reality, or the whole project collapses.

I do understand my limitations as a fiction writer, which is why my novels are always going to be close to home.

After these three novels I gave up writing novels for a time; I was dissatisfied with romantic doom, yet didn't see much way around it.

But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.

I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself.