George Stephen quotes:

I spent two months on the first draft, working 8 hours a day, five days a week.

On the other hand, now that I'm not dependent on fiction for my income, I've been writing more short stories despite the fact that there's no real paying market for short horror other than Cemetery Dance.

I'm a fan of short horror fiction... in fact, the most memorable horror I've read is of the short variety... but I have a hard time pulling it off myself.

I've devoted a lot of my time and effort during the past few years to developing my advertising copywriting business to the point of where I can support my family and don't have to depend on writing fiction for my income.

Trying to break into the horror market seemed natural.

So, I outlined a horror novel and started writing.

The benefit of this kind of outlining is that you discover a story's flaws before you invest a lot of time writing the first draft, and it's almost impossible to get stuck at a difficult chapter, because you've already done the work to push through those kinds of blocks.

In the first year, 1988, I wrote and sold 3 novels.

Many of my short stories (all unpublished) were horror, and the novel I'd just finished was horror, too.

During that first year, I felt guilty that my wife was out working bringing in all our income, while I was at home playing on the computer, so I made myself treat writing like a job.

For the novels I wrote before selling anything, I didn't outline much. I had a vague idea of the story.

For each book, the time is also broken up.

I've been reading horror since I was five years old.

The way I outline has changed quite a bit from when I first started writing.

When I was a teenager, I got into SF, quite heavily, and that too has had a major impact on my writing.

When I decided to take writing seriously, I did a lot of reading and analyzing of the books I liked, and came up with what I thought were pretty sound plotting and structure basics.