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I try to write about things, places, events, and phenomena I know about personally. That helps make the novels more genuine.

I like writing historical fiction.

I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.

I do my best to build a strong factual foundation for each of my novels and rely upon my author's notes to keep my conscience clear.

I feel very strongly that where the facts exist, a historical novelist should use them if they're writing about a person who really lived, because a lot of people come to history through historical novels. I did. And a lot of people want their history that way.

I tend to like to read history - recent history, because I find that much more intriguing than just a writer's imagination.

I often tell people who want to write historical fiction: don't read all that much about the period you're writing about; read things from the period that you're writing about. There's a tendency to stoke up on a lot of biography and a lot of history, and not to actually get back to the original sources.

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.

As an author of narrative history, I read a lot of history books.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm usually just trying to write about things that are interesting to me.