Reading has affected my writing, the fact that I read a lot and widely and that I am completely, wholly and incurably in love with language and with story. Reading told me early on that I wanted to write, too, because I wanted to create more of these worlds which held me so spellbound when they flowed from other minds and other visions. Reading a lot and reading widely is probably the best basic education that a child can get. God bless libraries everywhere.

I know that recently you were in Japan for the World Science Fiction Convention. What was that like?

Japan was weird and wonderful and I came back with 800+ photographs, ranging from the bizarre to the astonishingly beautiful; I'd highly recommend going to a truly alien place at least once in a person's lifetime, it definitely stretches your horizons.

There are parts of Europe that are staggering under the weight of their history, and the same is true in Japan, where you wander around temples and palaces built not hundreds but thousands of years ago, and the idea that there were once these people so far removed from us in time who lived and loved and worked and fought and played within these walls and in these gardens is eerie, enigmatic, and one that fills me with awe and curiosity. One of the gardens I was in had in it a weirdly-shaped pine that once been a Shogun's cherished bonsai and which had been planted into the ground some 600 or so years before when the Shogun died - it's quite a feeling, watching this centuries-old tree and wondering what tales it could tell if only it could talk...

Modern Japan is utterly confounding - it was the first time I had ever been to a country where I was functionally illiterate without benefit of translation or at least transliteration on signposts and information boards, and that was disconcerting. But the Japanese are resigned to wandering foreigners who look lost and bewildered and somehow knowing how to say "hello" and "thank you" and a lot of sign language gets you almost everything you need without any major dramas. And people bow to each other. A lot. And it's catching; upon our return home, a friend I was traveling with informed me that she had given that formal little Japanese bow to a completely astonished British bank teller, and I offered one of my own to the quietly amused passport checkpoint official when I stepped off my flight on my return to the United States.