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Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual.

A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.

Most mainstream male fiction is littered with heroines, and female characters are basically so great, you want to fall in love with them.

I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.

Far more women read fiction than men, and because of this, novels have become marginalised as serious texts.

Every book should have a romance.

My novels are often about people who are in love or attracted to each other.

I didn't know anything about romance novels until a friend suggested that I try writing one. After I read a few, I realized that my favorite part of fiction had always been the relationship aspect.

Certainly, there is a tendency to lump women who write similar types of books together, and it's not just in crime, is it? Women's fiction is supposedly a whole genre of itself. There's no male equivalent.

Of course it is very limiting to be labeled a lesbian or queer writer. We live in a homophobic culture, and even people who aren't hateful per se assume they won't get anything from a queer book.