Where I live, there is a group of fans who take me out to tea every year to pick my brains about what's coming up.

You won't have a story unless you have conflict, which means if there's no conflict in a situation, people look for a way to make some.

The only thing I knew about novels from a technical point of view was that they should have conflict.

Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades.

You know you're a hopeless record nerd when your time travel fantasies always come around to how cool it would be to go back to 1973 and buy all the great funk and jazz and salsa records that came out that year on tiny obscure labels and are now really rare and expensive.

It's hard now to imagine that kind of travel and the daily tasks they simply took for granted. If a wagon axle broke, you had to stop and carve a new one. To cross a river, you sometimes had to build a raft.

I'm not a nervous flier. I realize it's still the safest form of travel.

I still recommend reading travel guides as an insight to a traveller's perspective on fantasy worlds. Nearly all characters end up travelling at some point, and they have many of the same needs and concerns covered in travel guides.