I have a mantra in my head that there will always be another meal. I can put my fork down, knowing there will be good things in my future!
My mother's kitchen was built to be the focal point of our house. I got into the kitchen often as a child.
Dark chocolate, and salt and vinegar chips are my weakness - but not together.
I cook mostly vegetarian vegetable and bean stews. Quinoa salads. I make my mother-in-law's recipe for chicken and barley stew all the time.
You can't fake being able to cook well.
Find combinations of flavors you love and buy the best quality ingredients you can afford. Your food is only going to be as good as the sum of its parts, like anything else.
A big thing that gets people in trouble in the kitchen is not reading the recipe from start to finish before you cook it. Before you start anything, read through the entire recipe once.
During the day, if I don't have any other commitments, I'm usually at my desk writing, revising, or researching anywhere from four to six hours.
I also find doing the mundane, everyday things in life has a calming, creative influence on me. Some of my best ideas come when I'm vacuuming or waiting in lines.
When I'm in the midst of finishing a book, I can be working around the clock.
The 370-year-old antique shop Trifles and Folly is the heart of 'Deadly Curiosities,' my new urban fantasy novel from Solaris Books.
My father loved antique shops and shows, and quite a bit of my childhood involved outings to dim, dusty places packed with cast-off treasures.
I grew up around old stuff that was not necessarily valuable, but certainly unusual.
One of the best parts of being a writer means that researching all kinds of cool stuff actually counts as work!
Getting to share the stories in my head with other people and have them enjoy those stories, and having them come to see my characters as real. That's so cool.
I always send new writers to 'Writer's Digest Books' line-up of how-to books. I read them all when I was starting out, and they were very helpful.
Leaving a book is hard - 'Secret Six' was a book that people cared about. Even years later, the digital sales are great; the trades and single issues are expensive and highly sought after. It was meaningful to a lot of readers, which is endlessly gratifying.
I try to make every issue new-reader friendly. I remember being frustrated many times trying to pick up new series that were overladen with baggage. The trick is to make that backstory seem like something compelling that they will want to explore rather than an obstacle course they have to crawl through to get to the story.
My favorite characters are always the unpredictable ones, and with Domino, you literally never know which way the dice are going to roll.
The 'Womanthology' book got a lot of people jobs, inside and outside the industry, and I think stuff like that tends to be really effective. You have something in print that you can point an editor or a publisher to, and it makes a huge difference for a lot of people.
As time goes on, at both DC and Marvel, characters notch up so many victories that we often start to think of them as infallible, which is kind of death for adventure fiction.
The stuff we're seeing in 'Deadpool' and 'Harley Quinn' now, Plastic Man was doing in the 1940s. It's a character that was ahead of its time back then and the stories are still funny and still relevant.
My career path is the weirdest thing. I was a hairdresser, I worked at Marvel for a few months, and then I was signed to a DC exclusive for eight years.
Famously, DC has been pretty great showing gay women, with characters like Batwoman, but has shown fewer prominent men on the sexuality spectrum outside of hetero. It's something we need to address. I also think it's lovely how the readers respond to this.
Actually, the notion of what is acceptable for a moral government to do seems to have eroded in some ways since 9-11. Not to get too political here, but countries, including our own, seem to have accepted what was once almost unimaginable - condoning torture, for example, and even criminalizing peaceful protest.
