On boundary pushing: I thought Anne Rice (love her or hate her) also did some incredible things in that arena. If I ever meet her, I'll thank her. Without her, without Hamilton, a lot of people wouldn't have made it into print. It's very interesting to me how you can follow a chain of interesting writers into a whole new subgenre.

"And most people just don't do that. A lot of people don't want the genre conventions changed, because they like reading books that are comfortable."

Hehe. Just the other day I was talking to somebody about the female detective formula. People expect certain things from a female detective novel. You can break down book from Stephanie Plum to Anita Blake and you will find the same basic things: female heroine must be funny, there must be a love triangle, the bad guys must be primarily male, etc...