"Embracing the Writer's Inner Voice": "I now know that every writer has a little voice in their head telling them to write. They're actually born with that little voice in the head that tells them to write."

"Rethinking Writing Advice: Do not write what you know."

"The Long Road to Success": "Ninety percent of all writers do not finish what they start, but I finished it. Well, over the course of the next eleven years, I wrote seven more manuscripts. So I wrote eight manuscripts over twelve years. Finally, five of those went to New York publishing houses. They were rejected 85 times. I made it on the eighty sixth time twelve years after I started, and that was The Amber Room in 02/2003. And now here we are 26 novels later, and I get to keep doing it. So I had a very long process to get here, but it was worth it in the end."

Persistence Pays Off: "She was there all the way through. Why she stuck with me, I have no idea. She should have fired me long ago. But, she told me later, she said, that I just had a feeling we were gonna make it one day."

The Da Vinci Code Effect: "And then in 02/2003, Da Vinci Code came out, and Da Vinci brought the genre back, but not as a spy thriller, but as action history sequence conspiracies, as an international suspense thriller."

"The Hidden Stories Behind Historical Debts": "It will never ever reveal itself. But if you can put yourself in the right situation, the idea will jump out in front of you. And your job is to recognize it when it jumps out. And so it did jump out, and I realized there was a novel here. And I put together this whole thing around the pledge of Christ and the pope, Julius the second, and the money he borrows from the Medici, and the debt that's still owed today, and the fact that who's gonna be the next pope and the next prime minister of Italy hinges on the balance of cotton finding not only the pledge of Christ, but the last Medici. The the Medici family died out in 1743. It no more heirs. It went extinct."

Balancing Act in Fiction Writing: "You've got people who read our genre want information, but they don't want too much of it because we're not writing a textbook. We're writing a novel."

"Exploring Fiction Without Crossing Borders": "Two books I did. The Emperor's Tomb, I did not go to China, but I had a friend of mine who did. And he brought me back a lot of pictures and answered all my questions. And then I did not go to Antarctica for the Charlemagne pursuit. Though I'm gonna go to Antarctica in a couple of years. Couple of years from now, I wanna go really bad. So we're gonna make that trip in a couple of years. But, those are the two exceptions where I did not do any, I did not do did not go to the scenes on in those two books."

"Crafting a Standalone Series": "And so each one fits in the series, but it also stands on its own two feet too. And that's what you want."

"Empowering Communities through Writing": "We go into a community and we do a writer's workshop where we teach writing. You buy your way in with a contribution, dollars 200, dollars 3 hundred. That money goes to the project. We don't charge to come. We don't charge expenses. And then, you know, basically, the writers get taught, and the project gets money."