What happens to each of my female heroes, certainly, is they find something bigger than themselves that they are honored to serve. It's not giving up your family.

Your characters also seem to have to make compromises in different parts of their life. Alanna, for example, is a great knight, but she doesn't seem to have been such a good mother to Aly.

If we just allowed women and men more leeway in our culture and more acceptance, I think they would be able to make better compromises. Instead of forcing women to work eight hours and go home and care for a family, if we educate men and women to another format where men don't feel it's unmanly to stay at home, and we allow women to work from home...

I'm of the Samuel Goldwyn school of writing: If you need to send a message, call Western Union. Any messages people take away from my books are the ones they see in them. So far, [my characters have] been fortunate in finding partners who are accepting of them exactly as they are, which I've learned from my own experience is the best way for me, and I think for a lot of people.

We're filled to the gills with this sappy, sugary, true love myth that I think is hurtful in the long term....I don't believe in happiness as a consistent lifestyle...You need something a lot more stable than true love. True love will get you laid for a couple of years and all of a sudden you're looking at someone and thinking, "What do I see in this person?" Your chemicals wear off....True love sets us up to hate ourselves in the long run.

Now I'm sort of afraid to ask you about the Twilight books, but I want to know what you think of them.

The honest reply, which is what I give my fans, including fans who are fans of Twilight: I was only able to get through the first 50 pages of the first book, and I tried it twice. It wasn't because of the book per se. It was because I had overdosed on clothing changes in another writer's series, and now whenever I read too many clothing changes, I hear jungle drums, and lights flash, and I can't read any more....I don't know if the books are garbage or not, but what I hear from my fans is they're simply appalling.

What influenced your designs for the gods in your novels, since you've got two different sets of them?

When I was in a kid, I was in fourth grade, I read the Iliad and the Odyssey, and in fifth grade, it was the Egyptian gods and Robert Graves. By college, I was looking at world myth and legend and reading the abridged Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, where he points out the links between different kinds of gods and legends. For example, nearly every culture has a flood myth. If it's not a direct steal, like Mithros, who is Mithra [a Zorastrian divinity], or the great mother goddess, who is worshipped in the Mediterranean.

Have you read Neil Gaiman's Sandman books?