about seven years

I was at a book club recently and someone asked me a question that no one has before. How, she wondered, was it possible that it took me seven years to write my first book? What did I spend my time doing?

So, this is the answer.

I started off as a short story writer and spent ten years doing that, and when I decided to work on a novel, it took a while to get the hang of prolonging a story from chapter to chapter. It took a lot of reading of novels and outlining and thinking to figure all that o...