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I love my life, my family and my friends, and I'm drawn to 'relationship' novels because of their affirming focus on the power of love to heal wounds and transform lives.

And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.

I'm interested in female friendships and family relationships. So I don't write the traditional romance, where you just have the hero and the heroine's love story. I like intertwining relationships.

I love stories. I just enjoy telling stories and watching what these characters do - although writing continues to be just as hard as it always was.

If you write fiction, you have to love your characters. It's like your family. You don't have to like them, but you have to love them.

I write the kinds of novels I like to read, where the setting is rendered with love and care.

I have no particular reader in mind, but a passionate desire to tell an honest, moving story.

Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.

The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.

I like to believe my suspense novels marry the strong characters from my romance writing past, with the twisty, clever plots of my mystery writing present.