Susanna Kearsley

I can have my day carefully planned, but if someone wakes up with a cough or a sniffle, then everything changes. Thinking quickly and adapting without grumbling are essential skills to learn, in my opinion.

When I'm dealing with the 18th century, as I do in 'The Firebird,' the difficulty isn't only finding what a woman did, it's finding her at all. Most of the sources I'm dealing with - letters and memoirs and written reports of the day - have been written by men.

It's the pursuit of love and happiness that is the driving force of the romantic novel.

How much of our lives is consumed with meeting people, attracting people, keeping people and missing people? Usually, when everything is resolved romantically in one of my books, the characters stop talking in my head, and I stop telling the story.

A walk through the storage facility of the community museum where I worked might easily have convinced you that people in the past wore only wedding dresses, carried silver candlesticks, and played with porcelain dolls.

If it hadn't been for Bill Macdonald's book 'The True Intrepid,' I might never have found out about the women who went down to work in secret in New York for our own spymaster Sir William Stephenson in the Second World War.

I spent five years of my childhood in Port Elgin and came back to spend another five years of my young adulthood there as well, including the years in which I was first published.

My children are as at home in the Port Elgin library as I used to be, and they've sat in the cinema seats where I sat with their aunt every Saturday afternoon, watching the matinee movies.

I was born in the city of Brantford, Ontario, Canada - but by the time I'd left high school, I'd moved seven times with my family, my father's engineering work taking us to places as far-flung as Bay City, Texas, and Wolnae-Ri in South Korea.

The best way to show an emotion is not through a character's words, but their smallest expressions - to take what an actor would visually do and try putting that down on the page for the reader to 'see.'

Such is the endless dilemma of dialect. Not every reader will ever agree with the way that I handle it, no matter how hard I work to keep everything readable. But again it's that balance I have to maintain between keeping it easy and keeping it real, and I know that I'll never please everyone.

The recent controversy over the portrayal of Ken Taylor and his embassy staff in the movie 'Argo' brought home to me the great responsibility we writers have when telling stories that involve real people.