Nancy Pickard

I've lived in Kansas for more than thirty years, and for half of those, I was part of a ranching family, so I'm writing about things I know and love.

I've known a lot of cowboys and a few cowgirls. They're, by and large, some of the smartest, funniest, most courteous, generous, and hardest-working people you'd ever want to know.

I often feel like not writing! Sometimes I overcome it by just sitting there until writing happens. Sometimes I don't write, because books often need periods of percolation.

I go for drives in the Flint Hills, which is the setting for 'The Virgin of Small Plains'.

I love the unexplainable. It would be so boring to me if everything could be explained.

I live in a little suburb close to Kansas City called Prairie Village, where there's a feeling of everybody knowing everybody else. I think the same thing is true of New York City, by the way.

I'm a Midwestern girl, born and bred. It's harder for some of us to write about things closer to home. It's not so much a fear of telling the truth but wanting to do it justice.

I'm not interested in forcing my beliefs on my readers.

It's such a joy to talk to a roomful of people who have read my novel and are eager to talk about it.

Poisonous frogs feast on insects that don't even have names. Tropical lizards disappear into the cracks of trees whose branches spread out as wide as their trunks climb high. This is the real Florida, as it was before people, and probably will be after us, too.

I'm Marie Lightfoot, or at least that's the name my publisher puts on the covers of the books I write about true crime. In classic 'true crime' fashion, my latest one is titled 'Anything to Be Together.'

Everybody knows now that Marie Lightfoot, the true crime writer, is dating Franklin DeWeese, the state attorney of Howard County, Florida. They know I'm a white woman; they know he's a black man. That's not news anymore.

Being a writer - even a best-selling one - is usually not anywhere near as public as being a movie star, at least not when I'm out in 'real life' like this. Not that I don't use what fame I have, every chance I get, to help sell more books.