A: Sometimes I plan these twists, other times not. My work is as much character-driven as it is plot-driven. The characters are well defined in my mind, and they take on lives of their own that shape the story as it progresses. This probably sounds a little surreal, but many times the characters do things I wouldn’t have expected them to do. I might arrive at a point in the story where a facet of one of their personalities forces them to do something I simply had not foreseen. This is thrilling for me, as the author, and it demands a certain amount of discipline to allow the characters to act according to how I have defined them, even when this takes the story in an unanticipated direction. This leads to a lot of interesting twists and turns, some planned and others spontaneous.