I have written 30,000 words in a month - think of it - 30,000! I hope I am putting the right number of naughts: an average of a thousand words a day! For thirty days!
I wrote six nonfiction books before getting into narrative fiction with 'Robopocalypse,' including 'How to Survive a Robot Uprising.' My goal all along was to start writing fiction, and I guess one day I'd just had enough.
It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.
I think I made my first short fiction sale in 2005. I had been writing unsuccessfully before that.
There's a special gut-check moment the first time you write a scene in which somebody casts a spell.
I remember being interviewed about my first novel, 'The Colour of Memory.' They kept using the expression 'your first novel,' and I said, 'No, I object to that phrase, because this is it for me.'
I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.
They say you hit your stride as a writer at about 50. I'm hoping to do that.
I only published my first novel at the age of 40. Till then, I wrote short stories.
I have written more than 100 novels and novellas since 1983 - I was first published in 1985. There was an overlap of three years with my teaching career, but finally I felt good enough about my writing career to quit teaching and write full time.
I did not have one bad spell during writing - an unprecedented record.
'Pitch Perfect' was my first screenplay, so it was like my little baby.
I was eighteen when I wrote my first book, and I can't remember what it was called. I have no idea where the manuscript is - I lost it when I was twenty-one.
The exact day I became a poet was April 1, 1965, the day I bought my first typewriter.
It took me about 12 years to reach my million-word mark. The challenge now is to continue to challenge myself.
By serializing two novels in 'Analog,' the world's No. 1, best-selling science fiction magazine, I've had 200,000 words of fiction and three cover stories in that magazine. Quite an enviable record.
I never imagined when I began writing in the early 1960s I'd become professional and my life would be transformed.
The story wrote quickly. I called it 'Where You're From,' and I sent it out, as I had numerous other stories over the years. Except this time I got a letter back saying that it would be published. Someone out there had liked the story. I was thirty-one years old.
I am proudest of that first novel, 'Trust,' of anything I have written. I don't think I've had such intense energy since.
Publication in 'The New Yorker' meant everything, and it's no exaggeration to say that it changed my life.
My highest point was the first thing I won, a short story competition in a women's magazine in the Eighties. It was the first time I'd had my writing validated, and the first thing I'd ever shown anyone else.
I started writing seriously about 1960, at the fairly advanced age of 30.
So far it's 43 books in 25 years.
Back in 1992, I had my first story accepted by 'The New Yorker.'
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I've written 29 damn plays. Isn't that enough?
