Nancy Pickard

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.'

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 not interested in forcing my beliefs on my readers.