Gayle Lynds

I've always looked upon research as an opportunity to satisfy my curiosity. But the other side of the coin is one must not be so caught up in it that one never gets the book written. ”

For a decade, I was a stay-at-home mom. I sent my husband to his law office, sat on PTA boards and baked cookies - great cookies. All of a sudden, I had no husband, no job, few prospects, and two small children who had grown accustomed to eating. ”

The common wisdom is that only about 1 percent of a novelist's research ends up in his or her book. In my experience, it's even less - closer to a tenth of a percent. ”

If you're not in the hands of an expert editor, you really can go wrong in a lot of different ways. ”

You don't want to become guilty of plagiarism by letting someone else's words get inadvertently mixed in with your own. If you do feel the need to paste in a block of research while you're writing, be sure to highlight the copied text in a different color so you can go back and remove or rewrite it entirely later. ”

I've seen unpublished manuscripts where the writer doesn't know they are making fun of the villain - but they are. If you aren't afraid of your villain, how can your hero be afraid? ”

Do you love this story? If you love it, then you've got to write it. ”

Pulp paperbacks have always provided a training ground for men, Some of them went on to become respected authors - Dean Koontz, Nelson DeMille and Martin Cruz Smith, for example. Why couldn't a woman? ”

Ignorance is bliss, or so we're told. Personally, I find ignorance is also destiny. ”

Mosaic' is about what we see and what we don't see. I learned how people can develop other senses to compensate for a missing one when I was a child. My best friend, Carol, who is profoundly deaf, saved me from an approaching car that she 'heard' when I didn't. ”