One of the accidental joys of my writing life has been that I've had some lovely surprisingly good fortune with readers and I've brought readers to my dad's work. I can't tell you the joy that gives me. Because my father's work was masterful.

Both my mum and dad were great readers and we would go every Saturday morning to the library and my sister and I had a library card when we could pass off something as a signature and all of us would come with an armful of books.

We have newsreaders behaving like actors lowering their voices if it's a sad story as if we didn't know it's a sad story. There isn't a single cool newsreader.

By and large the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is after all a form of communication.

I do a little fact checking now and then. Other than that its impact is simply that email has revolutionized communication for me and my website has built up a community of readers which is a lot of fun.

To me the print business model is so simple where readers pay a dollar for all the content within and that supports the enterprise.

Newspapers with declining circulations can complain all they want about their readers and even say they have no taste. But you will still go out of business over time. A newspaper is not a public trust - it has a business model that either works or it doesn't.

The government's view is that the best time to announce bad news news that it doesn't want the public to dwell on is late on a Friday when it will wind up in the Saturday papers which if you were readers then the week day editions. A holiday weekend is even better.

I always have one or two sometimes more Navajo or other tribes' cultural elements in mind when I start a plot. In Thief of Time I wanted to make readers aware of Navajo attitude toward the dead respect for burial sites.