The surrealists and the modern movement in painting as a whole seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

When it comes to locations I'm one of those crazy authors who has to see it touch it taste it before I trust myself to recreate it for my readers. Having said that visiting a locked-down pediatric psych ward was the most intimidating research I've ever done - and I've visited maximum security prisons shooting galleries bone collections etc.

Technology has saved us money in some circumstances but it has really afforded us the ability to cover stories from locations we might not have been able to in the past.

What you have in most education software is that they're catering to the decision-maker who makes the budget allocations and that decision-maker has a lot of check boxes. Does it do this? Check. Does it do that? Check. They could care less about the end user experience.

If you were to ask my agent they would confirm this: I'm drawn to locations. What really drew me to 'The 4400 ' aside from the fact that it was sci-fi was the fact that it was shot in the city of my dreams: Vancouver.

One of the most amazing locations I've ever been is the top of the volcano in Tanzania Africa. It's an actual volcano where you really have this lava every day.

I don't like staying in hotels. I like to be in my own bed. San Diego as a city is really awesome. The only hard part of it for me is that I'm away from my family and my house. But as far as shooting down there we get amazing locations and the crew is really really stellar down there. They are really fun.