Ricardo Pinto Interview

What are you working on at the moment, and how satisfied are you with it?

Currently I am working on the third book of my trilogy The Stone Dance of the Chameleon which has taken me roughly four years so far. Of course I could wish that it was not taking so long, but I am pursuing my vision to its conclusion... and things are going well...

Can you tell us a few words about The Stone Dance of the Chameleon? How would you entice somebody who has never read your work to them?

I would say that, driven by inner forces, I started upon this story, with no notion of where it would take me. In a time where so much is throwaway, or dances to a commercial tune, I have ended up spending the best part of 12 years of my life - so far - giving birth to this monster, crafting it, with no goal other than making it true to itself. The result is a near-mythological evocation of what it takes to turn from a child into an adult; an epic set in a strange, but living world; a love story of suffering and redemption...

How did you come to an idea to write The Stone Dance of the Chameleon? What was your inspiration?

The journey towards the Stone Dance started a long time ago, one summer, when I was still at university, when I typed up an early version of the story. Some of the ideas were there, but really very few and they were very undeveloped. Tolkien's world creation had captivated me and there were other writers who produced rich worlds, Moorcock, Herbert, Le Guin but I wanted more... my own vision...

How come the main character in the Stone Dance is homosexual?

I'm not sure that he is. This category is really a rather recent invention. In the past, Ancient Greece for example, people were defined not by whom they slept with, but what they did with their sexual partners... The world that the Masters inhabit is one in which access to women is narrowly constrained. In such societies it is often the case that males develop love relationships with each other...

Who is your favorite character in Stone Dance? Why?

That's a very difficult question... I love/hate all of them one way or another... but I suppose if I had to go for one it would be Carnelian, because he's the one I'm most in the head of and who, in many ways, is me...

How did the years working on video games help you as an author, if they did?

If we put aside the characters that populate my books, much of the rest of the writing process is, for me, hardly distinguishable from creating a computer game. As I built my computer games from the ground up to achieve fully realized 3D environments, so I did the same with the world in which my story is set. Perhaps, at first, too obsessively so... the rigour essential for computer games is almost certainly overkill in books... primarily because in a book the reader 'timeline' is determined by the author, whereas in a computer game it is generally determined by the player. Of course, what computer games lack and what I discovered increasingly is the very centre of a book - are the characters. When it came to them, my computer experiences were of no help at all...

Are you still working on computer games?

No, I've been doing nothing but writing for quite some time... though a few years back I created a sci-fi world for a friend of mine who is developing it into a wargaming business and which might, one day, find its way into a computer game...

What is the weirdest experience you ever had with a fan?

There was one who offered to send me computer pictures of buildings which he made himself... For no reason I could fathom...

If you were to own several monkeys and/or midgets, how many would you own, and what would you name them?

Hmmm... Three - Prime, Artaxerxes and Blue...