In my experience, staying in a marriage that my ex and I both agreed had all its best moments behind it was epically depressing.
Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.
I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.
Back when I was 8 or 9 and wanted to be a nun, I would often stop at church on my way home from school.
My wife and I would be very comfortable having a baby at home or using one of the terrific nurse-midwives at the hospital.
To the old saying that man built the house but woman made of it a 'home' might be added the modern supplement that woman accepted cooking as a chore but man has made of it a recreation.
When I was a child I wanted to be a vet. I'd come home with "lost" kittens and dogs. My mother would tell me to put them back.
My parents were liberal intellectuals but even they expected me to stay at home and look after my younger siblings and do the housework.
Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.
Especially in the world of fantasy and superheroes, it's great to have role models that aren't in skimpy little outfits, in impossible poses. That's so important for young women.
But if you read Jane Austen, you know that she had a wicked sense of humor. Not only was she funny, but her early writing was very dark and had a gothic tone to it.
I've never had a study in my life. I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.
I think it's about as likely Jane Austen was gay as that she was found out to be a man.
I'm named after Jane Austen's Emma, and I've always been able to relate to her. She's strong, confident but quite tactless.
As with most liberal sexual ideas, what makes the world a better place for men invariably makes it a duller and more dangerous place for women.
Women are far and away the bigger consumers of fiction than men, but men are still far and away the more reviewed, the more critically esteemed, the more respected. That can get frustrating.
Male critics and men in the publishing industry want from their women writers what they want from their wives. I'm interested in presenting characters that are more challenging, threatening, complicated and unpredictable.
The old fun thing is when somebody typed up the first chapter of War and Peace. And then made a precis of the rest of it and sent it out and only one publisher recognized it.
I have nothing against romance. I believe that we must hold on to the right to dream and to be romantic. But an Indian village is not something that I would romanticize that easily.
Personally, I can't see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour.
But other vampire stories? Well, no, I really haven't read too many, and I can't say I'm crazy about romantic vampires anyway - to me the vampire is simply an evil monster.
