I am really, I think, truly an easygoing, positive, fun person.
I love everything about Philadelphia, and its food is like the city itself: real-deal, hearty, and without pretension. We've always had an underdog vibe as a city, but that just makes us try harder, and I love our scrappiness and scruffiness.
I like terrific writing, but I also like a terrific story. My favorite books have both, and they're by contemporary, commercial American writers.
My animals are a really important part of my life.
What I'm doing is writing stories about women who care about justice. They are women who think about the difference between right and wrong, what's legal and illegal, ethical and unethical, moral and immoral.
You can really help support a character if you understand the setting. So for that reason I generally write about Philadelphia.
I get up around 8 o'clock, which gives me enough time to walk dogs and feed chickens and horses. Then I get to work in my home office upstairs, and basically, I don't stop until I've written 2,000 words and/or the Stephen Colbert show is over.
I love writing both fiction and memoir. Both have unique challenges; bottom line, fiction is hard because you have to come up with the credible, twisty plot, and memoir is hard because you have to say something true and profound, albeit in a funny way.
And wouldn't we be better off if every New Year's, we thought about the things we did right and we resolved to keep doing them, no matter how wacky they were.