My parents are both professional artists. I suppose I inherited my interest in craftsmanship and creativity from them, but while they work with paint and clay, my images have always come in words. As far back as I can remember, I've been making up stories to tell myself. In a sense, my heroine and I grew up together, alter egos feeding on each other's dreams. As my world became more complicated, so did hers. I began to see that it had a form and history of its own, with the characters and incidents for a hundred stories. It was marvelous; it was frightening. I did my best to record it and was frequently discouraged by the results as, indeed, I am to this day. My first real encouragement came during the 1974 Clarion Writer's Workshop. I decided then that I really did want to write more than anything else, but by that time I had also made a commitment to graduate school. Since then, life has been a juggling act with either academics or writing in midair at any given moment. I hope soon to take my doctorate in English literature with an emphasis on nineteenth-century fiction—which probably explains why for my first full-length work I have written what in many respects is a Victorian novel. Readers who have difficulty with the plot might bear this in mind.