Readers sometimes think they know writers based on what they write. Erotic romance writers are always running into readers who are certain they must be practicing the same exotic routines they describe in their books, while suspense writers sometimes have to explain that, no, they haven’t really used an AK-47 lately. This kind of knowledge is rarely accurate, but if you read a lot of things written by a particular writer, you may actually begin to pick up on a few of their personal quirks.

Jennifer Crusie, for example, obviously owns pets, based on the number of them that show up in her books. Actually, this isn’t much of a revelation since Crusie has admitted as much herself, but the number and kind of animals who haunt Crusie’s books is also a pretty clear giveaway.

To take a detail that’s a little more difficult to suss out, Jayne Anne Krentz is a tea-drinker. Most of Krentz’s heroines drink tea and complain if they’re expected to drink coffee. Frequently, the hero is a coffee drinker, but his willingness to adapt to the tea-drinking preferences of the heroine is a clue to his being the Right Guy. If this only happened once or twice, I might call it coincidence, but since it shows up in so many of Krentz’s books, I’m betting it’s based on her own preferences.

Nora Roberts, on the other hand, is either a former or current smoker. No other romance writer I know of has so many smoking heroes and heroines (and I’m not referring to their degree of hotness either), or so many reformed smoking heroes and heroines. In Roberts’ earlier books, they’re all still puffing away, but in her later books they’re frequently trying to quit. In Angels Fall, for example, the hero is a reformed smoker who still thinks about the taste of the cigarettes he’s given up, and Roberts describes that taste lovingly. QED.

The redoubtable Kerry Greenwood is either a cook or a gourmand, possibly both. You’d expect food to show up in her Corinna Chapman books since Corinna owns a bakery, but food is also lovingly described in her Phryne Fisher books, which take place during the twenties, not what you’d think of as a high time for good cooking. My guess is that Greenwood is reflecting her own preferences in both series.

So what can you tell about me from my books? I own pets, but again that’s not much of a secret since I’ve mentioned my cats in blog posts. I love wine and margaritas, reflected in the amount of both that my characters consume. I like to cook, and good food tends to show up in my books.

All of that is very straightforward and something I’ll readily admit to. But here’s the thing: the stories themselves are fiction. With a few very minor exceptions (e.g., the shooting of the cat in Venus In Blue Jeans), the events themselves didn’t happen to me. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Hill Country, but I’ve never lived there, never worked in a winery, and never had a sociopath try to kidnap my baby (thank the good lord!). And that’s probably true for most of us who write. The details of our books we may take from life. The stories, however, we take from our own personal, sometimes perverse, imaginations.