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While in college, I used to get my ideas from photographs in 'National Geographic.' I started painting palm trees and motorboats.

For novelists, the imagination is everything. The trick is to guide one's imagination using research. I love using old maps. When I wrote my novels on London and New York, I found wonderful historical atlases. Paris has the most lavish maps of all.

We started with things like locating ski runs or locating a transmission line corridor or locating a new town or doing a coastal zone plan. We ourselves weren't doing the planning work, but we were doing all the mapping work for the landscape architects and planners who would subsequently incorporate the maps into their actual designs.

In the 7th grade, I made a 20-foot long mural of the Lewis and Clark Trail while we were studying that in history because I knew I wasn't going to be able to spit back the names and the dates and all that stuff on a test.

I've always been fascinated and stared at maps for hours as a kid. I've especially been most intrigued by the uninhabited or lonelier places on the planet. Like Greenland, for instance, or just recently flying over Alaska and a chain of icy, mountainous islands, uninhabited.

Mapping and visualization is a huge area of work and is of interest to many people. We're working on reinventing a new kind of 3D cartography to make it easier to tell stories with 3D maps.

With each book, in each place, I have to keep an ongoing map as I write because otherwise I don't know where I am.

When I was in high school, I had binders with pictures of tour buses.

I want to show how much fun you can have drawing... parents and children can draw together as a wonderful shared activity.

As far back as I can remember, I had an interest in fashion. I used to go to sleepaway camp, and they'd provide a list of things that you had to bring, and I always wanted to be a bit more creative than the list allowed. Like, if they required chinos, I wanted to hand-paint them.