If people ask me for the ingredients of success, I say one is talent, two is stubbornness or determination, and third is sheer luck. You have to have two out of the three. Any two will probably do.

There's a big overlap with the people you meet at the fantasy and science fiction cons.

Success is simply a matter of luck. Ask any failure.

I suppose you could say there is an in-built stubbornness to me.

Mysteries I read for fun, so I will probably never write one, for fear of spoiling the fun.

I had immediate success in the sense that I sold something right off the bat. I thought it was going to be a piece of cake and it really wasn't. I have drawers full of - or I did have - drawers full of rejection slips.