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Each book first begins with a little idea.

I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.

That first meeting - the one where the hero and heroine start the slow burn that takes the whole story to turn into true love - is the single most important part of the whole book. Nail it, and you've won yourself readers.

The opening lines of a book are so important. You really need to somehow charm your reader. If you can't get her attention in the first pages, you may have lost her. There has to be an ambience.

It would absolutely suck if you paid a few bucks for a book only to find that on the first page it said, 'Once upon a time they all lived happily ever after' and the rest of the book was blank.

One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.

Editors are more concerned with the first chapters of a book; that's what everyone reads first in the bookstore or in the online sample.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

The second book was probably the result of the relationship I was in at the time. We were only going to be compatible for a minute, and I think we both knew it. It's like how you can be a different person on vacation, but you know all along you're just visiting that mindset.

You can never step into the same book twice, because you are different each time you read it.