I sat down to try to write 'Edinburgh,' an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.

It took me a while to get back to 'The Queen of the Night.' I was angry with it as an idea because I felt like it had sort of ruined my life by taking so much attention away from 'Edinburgh.' So it essentially languished in a drawer until 2004, when I pulled it out, dusted it off, and thought, 'Oh, I actually really like this idea.'

I said that I like to write on trains and that I wished Amtrak had residencies for writers.

My mother's family has been in Maine for over 300 years on the same farm. They have a King George III deed.

In the summer of 1866, as Leo Tolstoy prepared for his serialized novel 'War and Peace' to be published as a single volume, he wrote to illustrator Mikhail Bashilov, hoping to commission drawings for the new edition of the novel, which he referred to by its original title,1805.

I don't write constantly; it's two serials and a novel a year.