Lynn Abbey

“If you write, one of the questions you're always trying to answer is, Where do you get your ideas? And, if you write, you know how pointless a question this is and how difficult it is to answer.”

“When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.”

“There is nothing that compares to an unexpected round of applause.”

“I'm always trolling for trivia.”

“A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.”

“One of my great passions is the collection of historical trivia.”

“I write sets of books, but I've also written a lot of orphans.”

“I'm a writer first and an editor second... or maybe third or even fourth. Successful editing requires a very specific set of skills, and I don't claim to have all of them at my command.”

“Editors of open anthologies actively seek submissions from all comers, established and unknown. They are willing to read whatever the tide washes up at their feet.”

“Ideas aren't magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.”

“I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.”

“It's possible to become so comfortable with one's style and structure that one ceases to grow.”

“I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.”

“It's been a long time since I've written old-fashioned sword and sorcery; I'm hoping it's like riding a bicycle.”

“When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.”

“I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's god-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books.”

“I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.”

“Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.”

“Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.”

“Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy.”