Interview with Hal Duncan, Part I

Sometimes in order to understand a book, one has to know something about the author who wrote the book. What can you tell us about yourself, your background, and how it might relate to the creation of The Book of All Hours?

I'm a child of the 70s, brought up in a Scottish "New Town" -- a small town expanded with housing schemes to take the overspill from inner city Glasgow. It was supposed to give the families a better life, but the result was just a cross-breeding of small-town bigotry and inner-city gang-mentality. Some of the Jack Flash sections -- the "inner narratives" -- in VELLUM are pretty much straight description of that shithole and its hopelessness. My feelings about Kilwinning are sort of summed up in the story about the missing kid that the characters go looking for -- based on the real-life disappearance of this young boy, Sandy Thomson. The thing is, they moved the families into the schemes as they were building them, so all the kids used to play in the building sites. I've always wondered if he didn't end up in the foundations of one of the houses, victim of some horrible accident or worse. That's the way I think of the New Towns -- a dream gone sour, built over the corpse of youth, innocence.

And yet... somewhere along the way that lost boy became a Lost Boy for me, reimagined as an escapee from reality rather than a victim, off having adventures in other worlds, other times -- across the limitless landscape of the imagination which I've tried to represent in the form of the Vellum. He sort of fused with Luke Skywalker, Flash Gordon from the old serials, and all these other golden-haired heroes of modern myth to become this character I'd tell myself stories about as I lay in bed at night, before dropping off to sleep. I called him Flash, and there's a lot of him still there in the Jack Carter of THE BOOK OF ALL HOURS -- a sort of archetype of the id, bound or unbound. The hero, I think, is often a sort of vessel for our desires, a compensatory fantasy. I'm out to subvert the whole wish-fulfilment aspect now, I hasten to add; Jack's not simply the projected alter ego who gets to do all the cool shit you can't do in real-life; he's more than that, I hope. But that is where the character has his roots.

Anyway, as I hit adolescence things just went from bad to worse in this pebble-dashed suburbia where even punk had sold out to Skrewdriver and neo-nazi bullshit. Unemployment was sky-high, Thatcher was voted-in time and again by Middle England, and there was still the sense that the USA and USSR might blow us all to hell. In fact, where previous generations worried about the future, I think we just knew there wasn't any. If the nukes didn't get you, then AIDS would. And that was the real kicker. I mean, there's me trying to come to terms with my sexuality and suddenly along comes the "Gay Plague". Fucking brilliant. And of course I was the smart geek who couldn't walk down the street without some gang of arseholes picking on me. So I was the classic miserable whiny adolescent who Wanted To Die. Years before Columbine I dreamt of massacring my class-mates. I actually went to school in a trenchcoat, honest to God. I had all sorts of schizo notions about deals with Death. I'd send him some souls and he'd do me right when they gunned me down at the end of the killing spree. Death and me, we were on first name terms. I was ready to walk with him.

And then my brother died.

The wish-fulfilment fantasies, the narcissistic rage, the grandiose delusions -- all of that adolescent bullshit was just shattered by this diamond bullet of a truth: people die. Nothing else really matters a fuck, as far as I'm concerned. Or rather anything that matters does so because of that fundamental fact, that there are people, and that they die.

If this all sounds terribly nihilistic and depressing, it's not intended that way. I think of nihilism as a liberating philosophy; it's an abandoment of absolutes, of false certainties that bind us into ideas of destiny, fate. Without giving away any spoilers, the very last scene in VELLUM is an expression of the liberating power of nihilism as I understand it. And understanding the death part of that simple equation -- people die -- gives us a better understanding of the people part, of the precious fragility of human life. That's something that's at the heart of the book.

That is quite a journey to undertake. Which raises a related question: How did you take those elements and weave them into what became The Book of All Hours? Was it trial and error, or did the basic framework of the story come to you suddenly? For looking back (and forward), it seems as though this story both preceded and followed you for a long time.

It started as two completely separate Grand Projects, both of which fell apart into umpteen short stories and novellas which, it gradually became obvious, were part of one single over-arching framework. Back in the 90s the idea of the Book of All Hours had popped up in some experimental steampunk nonsense I'd been writing, (which also featured a prototype of Jack Carter). That early stuff was all shit -- I ended up burning it along with the rest of my wanky adolescent scribblings -- but some of the ideas carried over into the first Grand Project, a huge monster of a novel in four parts, themed around the seasons and times of day. It was going to be set in a city at the end of time, with bitmites flowing through the streets. It was going to be written in a language full of Joycean word-play and allusions. It was going to retell Parzival from the viewpoint of his half-brother, Feirefiz, with touches of the Bellerophon myth. It was going to be the story of Babel rebuilt, the Grail brought out of hiding, the great ur-myth that all other myths are only fragments of. It was, of course, utterly bonkers. I got a few chapters and a fuckload of notes written before shelving it.

The second Grand Project was more straightforward. Although it had a similarly obsessive syncretism at its heart -- in trying to incorporate all the gods and titans, angels and demons of every culture throughout history into the singular mythos of the unkin -- what I was planning was a set of stories which would share the same back-drop and a few of the same characters but would ultimately each stand alone. I got as far as a couple of stories before that project stalled too. I think that approach was just too limiting in terms of tone; it didn't give me the freedom to be pulpy one minute, poncy the next.

So I just abandoned the whole idea of a Grand Project and started writing short stories and novellas as they came, ignoring the correspondances and links between them, ignoring the fact that very few of them actually worked in isolation from each other. Things like the Jack Flash section, the expedition to the Caucasus, the Faerie chapter -- these were all written as individual stories at first. The guys at the Glasgow SF Writers Circle would tell me, this story is cool but it doesn't make sense unless you've read that one, that one makes sense but it doesn't really work as a story. Everything I wrote was like a... fragment of a broken hologram, you know, where each piece has a little area in tight focus but it also has a blurry image of the whole, the Big Picture. Eventually I found myself coming full circle, writing the story that would become the Prologue (which brought me back to the Book of All Hours), and two novellas which would become the Phreedom and Thomas chapters (which brought me back to the unkin).

That was the point where it all came together into the Book of All Hours. I started looking at those fragments as part of a puzzle, figuring out what the underlying story was and whether they could be arranged so that story would be told as much in the juxtapositions of narratives as in the narratives themselves. In a strange way, the basic framework was there right back at the start, a four act cycle based on the seasons and times of day. It just took me ten years to realise what I was writing.

In a previous interview, you describe Vellum as a sort of Cubist Fantasy. For the readers here, could you elaborate more on this?

On a superficial level, the fragmentation of the narrative into little chunks, the way these chunks are put back together with this bit or that seemingly "out-of-place" in linear time -- in one sense Cubism is just a good comparison for how the reader has to reconstruct the narrative out of these strange chunks, like the "bizzare cubiques" that gave Cubism its name. You have to step back from the work, see it as a whole, build the abstract story in your imagination rather than expect a straghtforward direct representation. To some extent I use the phrase Cubist Fantasy as a sort of warning. If you get Picasso and Braques, you'll probably get what I'm trying to do with VELLUM; if you hate that type of painting you may well hate the book.

On a deeper level though, I think there's some more fundamental similarities. There's an idea of 3D time that underpins VELLUM, an idea that as well as the forward-and-back linear time we're aware of, there's a side-to-side of parallel worlds, and an up-and-down of realities which work by different metaphysics entirely. Think of it in terms of story. A story starts at the beginning and goes in a straight line to the end -- the "frontal" time we recognise. But a story, the myth of Inanna's descent into the underworld for example, has variations -- in one version she has a single rescuer, in another there's two. So that's your parallel realities, your side-to-side time. And over generations these stories are retold, simplifed and/or complexified, revisions lain down on top of the old like sedimental strata. Think of the way James Joyce used the myth of Ulysses as a substrate for his novel.

So in the same way the Cubists were using fragmentation to try and represent a 3D object in the round, or as if from outside space itself, to give us a multi-faceted perspective on it, that's what I'm trying to do with VELLUM in terms of time -- to present the story as a 3D object, with the multiple perspectives all fragmented and folded together.

In reading Vellum, I was reminded of this quote by Borges: "The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." How would you relate the world of The Book of All Hours with this concept of authorial time/space, and to what degree (if any) would this tale reflect perceptions of our shared past/present/future?

I'm not sure about that Borges quote, because to me it feels too focused on the modern writer, on an idea that through their work we rewrite the past in our imagination, aligning the writers who came before into a heritage which culminates in this end-of-line product. So this modification of our conception of the past would be a way of establishing the lineage of one's work, of selecting one's historical precursors and setting them up as benchmarks, signposts pointing along the road to here and now, to this fiction which is mine. Now certainly with VELLUM there's a huge amount of referencing of past writers. I suppose you could see the book as establishing a lineage from the anonymous Sumerian scribe who wrote Inanna's Descent, through Aeschylus and Virgil, right up to James Joyce and Edward Whittemore, William Gibson and Michael Moorcock. But the linearity of the idea of "precursors", of past, present and future -- something about that makes me uncomfortable. It would feel self-aggrandising to co-opt these writers as my literary forebears, to represent them as steps along the road to me.

No, I think the focus has to be shifted in the other direction. Every writer, I'd say, sets themself up as a signpost -- on a junction in the middle of nowhere, where multiple roads converge. They set up signs pointing in different directions: Joyce, 100 miles; Aeschylus, 200 miles. In some respects that can be a way of orienting the reader, so they can triangulate the writer's "position" in relation to these landmark authors. And in establishing that junction of influences, the writer may well transform the readers concept of the past: Aeschylus is closer than they would've thought from here, just a short drive south; the road to Joyce is downhill from this point in authorial time-space, rather than the hellish uphill struggle if you're coming by a different road. A lot of what I'm trying to do in VELLUM is set up a junction where you can get from, say, William Gibson to that anonymous Sumerian scribe in a few minutes' drive. Because I think that's an interesting journey to make.

I'm not sure I'm expressing this very well. If you think of the 3D model of time, the Vellum, it's hard to talk in terms of past, present and future; that's just one dimension, and in that context, those other writers aren't being treated as linear precursors; they're perspectives, angles on the story-as-object. Aeschylean tragedy, Virgilian eclogue, Gibsonian cyberpunk, Joycean modernism -- I'm kind of trying to unmoor them from their temporal setting altogether, to bring them together such that the ancient becomes modern and the modern becomes ancient in the reader's mind. Don't think of Prometheus Bound as being of a dead past; it's as relevant, as present as when it was first written.

So would it be fair to say that in some senses at least, that one interpretation of the greater story unfolding within the Vellum is that of how we ‘place’ or ‘position’ ourselves in relation to other people, to other ‘landmarks’? Because it seems to me that one could make an argument (not THE argument, but merely an argument) that part of what is going on within the story is the active insertion of the Reader into the Text in such a way that temporal and spatial differences are being warped. Or is this a misleading interpretation of the story?

I think that's fair. I mean, the metafictional aspect of the work is right up front; in the Prologue where you have Reynard Carter finding this Book which, according to one legend, contains every story ever written and every story never written. Theoretically, then, it must contain his own -- and yours and mine too. And that idea is woven throughout the novel; there's a recurring theme of how we can become trapped in the story of ourselves, the roles we've chosen for ourselves but believe to have been chosen for us. Often in post-modernism that type of metafictional conceit is all about distancing the reader from the text, deliberately placing the story in inverted commas, as an artifice, but what I wanted to do was pretty much the exact opposite. I wanted the reader to find themself drawn into the text, to be actively engaged with it. You could argue that the central protagonist of VELLUM is actually the reader themself; instead of being an outside observer, the reader is being invited in as a participant.

The hope is that in folding all these pasts and futures, parallel realities and fantastic realms around and through one another, in reconstructing the writer's version of the story, the reader will also be constructing their own version. Maybe the best way to explain this is in terms of the Matthew Shepard section. There we have a real-word event fictionalised, fantasised as the murder of a faery. A simple retelling on that level can be emotionally powerful, but it's always going to be "just a story", filtered through the writer's words and images and distanced by its intrinsic nature as a representation; it's something we look at, not something we're in. You can -- and I do -- try to suggest a larger scope by drawing parallels to other similar stories -- like that of Thomas, Tammuz, Pan or Christ -- but still what you're left with is "just a story", albeit an eternally recurring one. At the end of the day those references only add extra depth to that representation. So what I wanted to do was use this metafictional idea that our reality, the reader's reality, is just another fold of the Vellum to collapse that sense of distance. In the past I've said that I wanted to throw the reader out of the story at the end of that chapter, to suddenly strip away the fantasy and point the reader out into the real world, to have them slam face-first into the brutal truth of a real-life crucifixion. But maybe another way to look at it is that I want to make the reader suddenly look down and realise that this is what they're standing on. They're walled-in by the fictions of Thomas, Tammuz, etc., but the solid ground they're standing on is the real story of Matthew Shepard.

In essence, what I'm trying to do is carve out an abstraction, the story as a space defined within those walls, fictive and real, with the reader positioned within that space, within the story, seeing it every which way they turn, hopefully even seeing it in places I haven't. So there's no escape, no cosy reassurance in the knowledge that these events happened elsewhere, elsewhen, in fiction or history. That 3D model of time, and the metafictional insertion of the reader into that timespace is a way of saying, look, this story is all around you, not just there and then but here and now -- my here and now, and yours too.

End of Part I

Interview with Elizabeth Moon

Indeed, the newest interview I'm bringing to you is with Elizabeth Moon. I was verry happy for getting to work with this amazing women, and it was my real pleasure making this interview.

Did your style change noticably from the time you started writing columns for the weekly newspaper and articles?

My style has probably changed over time, but I don't really notice that. I do notice a difference based on what I'm writing: each type of writing "asks" for a slightly different voice. Nonfiction tends to be conversational or instructional--either chatting or teaching—while fiction tells the story in the voice appropriate to its type.

Is there something you would change in your first published books?

There are a couple of really bad typos in the very first edition, which we caught in later editions. Aside from that, no. If I wrote them now, they'd be informed by another 20+ years of experience, but I don't know that they would be "better."

You have co-worked with Anne McCaffrey on two books. What was it like working with her?

Anne is a gracious, generous senior author, and delight to work with. I learned a lot from her.

Do you plan on co-operating with other authors? If yes, who with?

Probably not any time soon. It's too much fun playing in my own sandbox.

What does co-writing look like? How does it work?

Every pair of co-authors does it a little differently. Sometimes one is definitely the senior author, and sometimes they are more equal partners. Sometimes they work in the same office and sometimes (as with us) an ocean apart. So there really isn't one single answer.

You got serious about writing in your mid-thirties. What was your job before that?

I was in college or the military or college again until my early thirties, working part-time jobs that included tutoring math and science, photographing at horse shows, and even painting signs. While in graduate school, I was looking toward work in biology, probably in wildlife management or wildlife behavior research--which is now my unpaid "job." Once we moved to the small town we now live in, I did volunteer work with the local ambulance service and library, and for awhile worked as an unpaid assistant in a rural clinic.

Why fantasy?

Why NOT fantasy? I enjoy writing several kinds of stories, both fantasy and science fiction (from hard SF to "space opera" to near-future almost-mainstream.) Each gives me (as the writer) a different flavor of pleasure to work with.

What can you tell us about the book you are currently working on?

I'm working on the fifth and final book of the Vatta's War series, science fiction that straddles the divide between space opera, military SF, and political SF.

What are your plans for the future?

Write more books and keep working on our wildlife management project. I'm not sure what kind of book I'll write after the one I'm working on...but I know exactly what needs doing on the land.

Apart of writing, what are your interests?

Music (I sing in a choir), biology, emergency medicine and prehospital care (even though I'm no longer in the ambulance service, it's still an interest), prairie restoration and wildlife management, horses, wildlife photography, history, fencing (Renaissance style, rapier and dagger or buckler), politics, spaceflight, cooking...just about anything but filing and housework.

And the last question in this interview is the traditional question of the OF: If you were to own several monkeys and/or midgets, how many would you own, and what would you name them?

Aren't two mischievous horses enough trouble already? What I need in the "small" category is a brownie to crawl under the desk and keep my computer cords untangled, or plug and unplug things when I need that done. If I had such a creature, I'd name it Caliban, even though that's asking for trouble...though not as much trouble as if I named it Puck.

Thank you for being so kind to do this interview. We wish you the best of luck with your work.

Thanks for asking me.

That is it, for now.

Interview with Guy Gavriel Kay

Scrolling down you will find an interview with Guy Gavriel Kay, the author of Tigana, The Fionavar Tapestry and A Song For Arbonne among many others. Enjoy.

What would you say to entice somebody who has never read your work to read your books?

Different answers for different books, actually, as I've been a bit of a moving target over the years. The Fionavar Tapestry is my 'take' on Tolkien-style high fantasy, an attempt to incorporate a great many of the classic elements of the genre, but interweave complexity of character and motivation. My later books moved slowly but surely towards a space I discovered or created marrying history with fantasy, to explore themes I think are hugely relevant to readers today. I've spent nearly twenty years trying to make the point that fantasy can be as important as any other form of literature. One reviewer described the books as 'the kind of escape that brings you home.' If that notion appeals, the books should.

Do you lay out the structure of your books completely before beginning to write, just in skeleton form, or not at all?

Not at all. I subscribe to the British novelist Graham Greene's notion that if he outlined is books he felt like a stenographer while writing them. The novels are a discovery process for me as much as for the reader. I do know the themes, and a general sense of character and destination ... but the route unfolds as I go.

What effect did your work with Christopher Tolkien on editing The Silmarillion have on your own writing?

I think, looking back, that the exposure to JRRT's drafts, notes, false starts, dead ends helped to make me less awed and intimidated, later, when I started my own large fantasy. At the time I began Fionavar most of the 'serious' writers exploring fantasy were working AWAY from the epic form, as if surrendering it. That was the period when, for example, 'urban fantasy' was being shaped. My experience with The Silmarillion and the papers helped me to avoid that need to 'go somewhere else' in fiction. Later, I did move elsewhere to a degree, but it was because I was testing my own boundaries as a writer, not because I was abandoning the form.

Being a fantasy author, do you believe in magic, aliens?

Not in any sense that the genre embodies. I do believe there's life elsewhere in the universe. I hope there's baseball out there.

Where do you think your characters come from? Are they based off of people you are acquainted with or did they happen to pop into your head one day?

Neither, actually, though I tease friends that I've used them for various villains. The characters emerge from an immersion in the periods I'm researching for the books. For example, when I was reading about Byzantine history for Sailing To Sarantium and then Lord Of Emperors it became flat-out obvious to me that a mosaicist would have to be a central figure (ultimately THE central figure) and the idea of a sharp-tongued, angry, gifted artist began to emerge.

Many of your characters are artists, musicians, scholars and the like. Does this focus on the arts reflect on your own interests?

This fits nicely to the last question! Which of us did that? I've always been interested in the relationship of art and power, a theme that goes back a very long way in history. Artists of all kinds are also exceptionally useful to a writer as 'window' characters into a culture as they are – by definition, almost - observers of the culture and sometimes a bit estranged from it. They help the writer (and therefore the reader) to get a view, a perspective on that society. The risk - which is easier to avoid in fantasy and historical fiction - is for a navel-gazing, self-absorbed character.

What do you feel are the prevailing themes throughout your work? Fionavar dealt with good and evil, Tigana dealt with memory, Lions dealt with religious and cultural strife... Would you say there are unifying themes underlying your work? What are they?

Well, in a way, your question cleverly answers itself. You've noted diverse themes (Fionavar is, in many ways, about the price of power, actually) and this is simply the truth: each book starts with a theme, a REASON for me to be writing it, and for readers to spend however long it takes to read it. I need something more than 'paying the mortgage' as a motivation to spend as long as I do immersed in a book (three years for each, more or less) and the varying themes offer me that. They keep me thinking, asking questions. There are overlapping motifs among the books, and various critics and academics have been adroit in spotting them - and sometimes spotting links that aren't
there ... but that's another issue entirely!

How did you decide to write about civilizations so closely based on actual history, rather than creating entirely new cultures? What advantages/disadvantages does this method provide?

I've actually written speeches and essays on this topic, and some of them can be found over on brightweavings.com, the authorized site on my work. The answer is complex and many-faceted. One aspect of it is that over the years I've grown increasingly interested in the interface between fantasy and history, the ways in which making the past fantastical can (paradoxically) bring it closer to the reader, not more distant. This follows from the way that, in a fairy tale, we are ALL the youngest son of the woodcutter who goes into the forest, or the only daughter of the fisherman, who goes down to the sea one evening ...

Your recent books have been closely tied to real history. How do you decide when to stay close to what actually happened, and when to allow your characters and civilizations to follow their own paths, which may not so closely reflect their historical basis?

This has varied from book to book, Maja. In A Song For Arbonne I wanted to offer some hints as to how western history might have been different if certain events had fallen out differently in medieval France and Provence. In The Lions Of Al-Rassan I wanted to SHARPEN awareness of what happened in medieval Spain in and around the time of the Reconquista (the Christian reconquest of the peninsula) so I 'telescoped' events but didn't change the ultimate result.

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

Although I have been informed that several of my most esteemed colleagues and fellow-authors have leaped - nay, fallen all over themselves! - to reply to this delicate, probing inquiry, I am going to courteously pass, in order that we may both claim that no primates or vertically-challenged humans were injured or maligned in the making of this interview.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

An interview with Stephen R. Donaldson

Here is an interview I did with Stephen R. Donaldson. It was a pleasure working with Stephen, and I hope that it will be a pleasure for you to read it.

Are you thinking of doing something outside of the genre realm? Like a straight prose or even some poetry?

I don't plan my work in that fashion. I wait for ideas to come to me. And I don't "judge" them at all, or try to fit them into any particular genre. I try to write whatever my ideas ask me to write. (Consider my four "crime" novels, or the poetry on my web site.)

When you are writing, how important is the actual prose? Some folks seem to really focus on plot, world building or character development and seem to not prioritize prose. For others, prose is extremely important. Some come down in the middle, poor prose can kill a decent story, but good prose cannot lift up something dross. While writing, how much do you focus on the craft? Is it something that you come back and edit later?

I live for and through language. I see and feel with language. For me, "import" on every level is about language. Other writers have different (and equally valid) approaches; but for me a story fails if its prose doesn't "rise to the occasion" of its characters and plot.

In my first drafts, my over-riding priority is simply to get the story on paper. But I rewrite extensively and often. That's when I hone the crude forged metal of my prose into something that I hope will have a cutting edge.

Have you ever had any trouble with fundamentalists who object to their portrayal in the first and second Chronicles?

Very, very rarely. In general, those people don't read (so they don't know how they've been portrayed). They "demonize" an author when that author has become hugely popular among children (e.g. J. K. Rowling). Other than that, they live in ignorance.

Was it a conscious decision to have the importance of free will as the central theme of many of your books (The Ravers, The Zone Implant, Two of the Stories in Reave the Just), or did that just sort of slip in by accident?

I don't do it deliberately, but that doesn't mean it happens "by accident". It's an unconscious expression of who I am (or who I was when I wrote the particular story in question).

What, if any, connection is there between The Land and Middle Earth? There are some similarities between the two, is The Land homage to Middle Earth or is Middle Earth a model for what the Land is?

Tolkien's work made what I do possible. In that sense, "Lord of the Rings" is an inspiring model for "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant." But Middle Earth itself was never a model for the Land (except in the sense that Tolkien showed me what could be done within the bounds of epic fantasy). Looking back, I can see "echoes" of Middle Earth in the Land. But then, I can see "echoes" of *lots* of things in the Land (Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" leaps to mind).

Thomas Covenant is an anti-hero. While you are not the first to write such a main character, it seems fair to say no one else was doing it in the time period when you first wrote. What authors do you think you read that influenced you to pursue writing a fantasy novel with this type of character? Are there other authors today you think are writing this type of character well?

I never know what to say in response to such questions because I don't think of Covenant as "an anti-hero": I think of him as the most important kind of hero there is, a *human* hero. I learned more about his character by reading "The Ambassador" (Henry James) than I did from any fantasy I've read (with this disclaimer: I'm a *very* slow reader, so there are many contemporary writers of fantasy whose work I haven't had time to read). However, I suppose I should mention Tennyson's "Idylls of the King," since it provided the foundation for much of what I've done with Covenant--and it is certainly fantasy.

What do you think your next move will be once Covenant is finally finished?

I have no idea. I never try to make those decisions in advance. However, short stories seem likely.

Who can drink more beer, Covenant or Avery?

Please. Everyone knows that the people in the Land drink springwine, not beer--or, if they're very lucky, diamondraught.

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

Sleazy, Gropey, Dumpy, Rashful, Non-Sequiter, Aloysius, and Doc.

Interview with KJ Bishop

Below you can find an interview with KJ Bishop, an author who wrote the novel The Etched City. I hope these questions will help you understand her better, and if not yet, make you interested in her works.

Tell us a bit about yourself - how did you become the person and the writer that you are today?

That's rather hard to answer. Wishing to be not just one person; to wriggle out of the confines of one flesh, one gender, one set of social circumstances, the thoughts of one mind only. A lifelong desire to shapeshift. I did this all my life, but it manifested in writing comparatively late.

Who were some of the authors you were reading growing up and what influence, if any, did they have on your decision to write the types of stories that you write?

As a kid I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction, but it wasn't until I was in my 20s that I read things that made me want to write--M. John Harrison's 'Viriconium' stories, Jeffrey Ford's 'The Physiognomy', and a bunch of decadent 19th century books that I got into at university. Those books opened my eyes to the wider possibilities of fantasy. And Michael Moorcock - I hugely admire his work, especially the way he marries mature ideas with adventurous stories.

What is the story behind the writing of The Etched City and are there many, if any, differences between the Prime edition and the Bantom reissue a couple years later?

The differences between the two editions are all small stuff – words here and there, a couple of paragraphs; the Bantam edition had some extra copy editing.
The book grew organically out of a pile of other things. I'd been writing bits and pieces about Gwynn, but the book didn't get legs until Raule appeared in my head. But even then, it was my third or fourth attempt at writing something about her. (Originally she was a somewhat different woman, called Odile, who still lives in my head and should have a book of her own one day.) She brought the Copper Country with her and guided me into the novel - then sort of wandered off, leaving me to deal with the sordid complications of Gwynn's life!

How did you come up with the characters of Gwynn and the Rev and is there any chance of us seeing them in other works of yours?

Gwynn was in my mind for a long time. I think he started out as a cross between David Bowie, Alice Cooper, and Richard E. Grant as Withnail. He went through a lot of cosmetic changes before he became the character in the book, but he's always been basically the same guy at heart. In fact, I don't think I did come up with him; he came up with himself – probably thousands of years before I was born.
The Rev also pretty much came up with himself, although physically he somewhat resembles the priest at my old school, who was a former wrestler and had a rough-around-the-edges look.

Seeing them again? Never say never. Both of them are still in my mind, and I think they were a good sort of odd couple. Maybe one day I'll do a sort of 'Closing Time' featuring Gwynn as the feral old rake he's probably doomed to become.

What are you working on at this moment and is there a chance you could tell us a little bit about what to expect form you in the coming years?

I've learned not to talk about it - talking about current work always seems to jinx it. But I hope I'll do a lot of different things, both fantasy and mainstream.

You've worked as a graphic design artist in addition to being a writer. To what degree is there a synergy between those two fields?

I don't do commercial art anymore, but I still draw for my own pleasure. Sometimes things draw themselves, and some of them give me ideas for my writing. My drawing-brain seems to go places my writing-brain doesn't, and vice versa.

Your website states that you are currently living in Thailand where you are teaching English. Has your experience in Bangkok influenced your perceptions of the world and perhaps infiltrated into your fictional writing?

Thailand's a very interesting place. Although it's becoming a more secular country, there's still plenty of belief in gods, spirits and magic. And Bangkok is a kind of cheerfully decadent place - at least, expat life here is a bit that way. I don't think it has so much influenced my perceptions of the world as provided me with a physical environment that gets along rather well with my imagination.

There's an adage that states that no writer is writing in a vacuum. To what extent do you agree or disagree with this statement in regards to your own writing?

In my case it's completely true. I'm like a sponge. I'm aware that I soak things up and use them - sometimes changing them, sometimes not. I don't think anyone does anything in a vacuum - and I don't know how anyone could imagine that any artist could work in a vacuum. The Author has been dead for quite a while now. I've always felt that my ideas, and characters, come from somewhere outside myself. That may or may not be true, but the feeling certainly precludes any sense of being in a vacuum.

The last question is the traditional question of the OF: If you were to own several monkeys and/or midgets, how many would you own, and what would you name them?

I would own a hundred monkeys, give them a hundred typewriters, and let them go for it. I would name them all William Shakespeare. I would own seven midgets to look after the monkeys, and I would name them Wrathful, Horny, Greedy Guts, Jealous, Vain, Lazy, and Capitalist.

Well, that is it for now. I hope you enjoyed reading this interview.

Interview with Laurell K. Hamilton

Dear Laurell K. Hamilton,

Thank you for accepting to do this interview for wotmania.com - other fantasy section, and being so kind to answer these questions for us.


How did you come to the idea to write books about vampires? Why vampires?

I've loved vampires since I was a little girl. Why vampires and not some other monster? Not sure but my two favorites have always been vampires and werewolves. I guess I prefer monster that can eat you, or at least drink you. One of my earliest completed stories, at fifteen, had vampires in it.


What do you like the most about your books?

That 15 books into the Anita series and I'm still learning new things about my characters and my world.

Are any of your characters' personalities taken from people you know?

Not really. Sometimes a gesture, or some small thing will get incorporated, but I; I’ve never based anyone’s personality on people I know.
Anita, being my fist attempt at first person narration was close to my own personality in some ways. Part of that was accidental and part was to make the writing easier. Our personalities have diverged as our life experience has diverged over the years.

What part do you have in the Dabel's Adaptations of the Anita Blake book? How much of the sexuality will make it into the comics?

We see everything, from concept, script, sketches, etc. If something doesn't work we send it back and they try to get it closer. They've been wonderful.
What most people tend to forget is that there is no actual sex until book five. So it's not really a hard issue right now.

You are one of the few writes that write sex so vividly, yet still make it part and parcel of the plot/storyline - not just titillation. Will you continue to push the boundaries of sexual explicitness in your books?

If the plot or characters demand it, yes.

I see some similarities between Anita and Merry. Like both being not so tall, both being tough girls, both being (some sort) of detectives. Was that intended or just coincidence?

Well, I've never been tall and when you choreograph fight scenes or sex scenes, it's just easier if you have about the same size as the character you’re writing about. Why is it so strange that my female characters are tough? I had no idea there was an alternative to it. Frankly, I worked very hard that Merry isn't a clone of Anita, but for the short and strong personality.

How much research do you put into each novel? Which book took the most research?

For factual things, I like three different sources. So a good bibliography in a book is a must on a research book. I will often look for those books they list. It is easier to get someone to believe in the fantastical elements if you have your factual elements correct.
I have been told by people in New York that I do more research for my fiction than most people do for their nonfiction. So, though I don't write hard science, I do a lot of research. I have a degree in biology, which probably influences the amount of detail I want. For instance, in Caress Of Twilight I needed to give one of my minor-major characters moth wings. I researched for a week for Eurpeon silk moths. There aren't many of them. There are even fewer that have ever flown over Britain. The only one I could find at present day just wasn't quite spectacular enough for me.
Here is one of Hamilton's rules of writing. You can fudge the facts, if you know the facts first. So I ended up combining about four different moths; one for the shape of the hind wing, another for the eyespots, a third for the outer wing coloring, and a fourth for some added color. Here's a little known fact. Due to one moth in Europe, they now theorize that moths and butterflies may have been brighter colored before the industrial revolution. As the pollution darkened buildings and the surrounding trees, the brighter colored insects were eaten faster, and didn't get to breed as much, survival of the fittest at work. So, my brighter moth wings may be more accurate than we'll ever know. I know these wings are not on a present day living moth, so I can combine living moths to make my own design. I did the research, covered my desk with pictures of the different moths and created, like Dr. Frankenstein, the moth of my dreams that better matched what I needed.

I know, I know my zombies are not right. I do know that zombies are not shambling, rotting corpses as portrayed in the Anita books. That is a Hollywood invention, but it was just too fun not to use. Again, I did my research and then broke the rules.

When you started writing Anita Blake books did you have some sort of ending in mind? How much of the story line did you know?

I started with about 15 plots sketched out, but other books have spawned new ideas, so at book fifteen, I’m not even half way through those first plot ideas. Some of the original ideas are actually abandoned because Anita and her world have changed since the original notes.

Do Merry and Anita live in the same world? If they do, is it possible for them to meet?

No, they are separate worlds. Besides, both are first person narrative. So it would be impossible to write.

And the last question in this interview is the traditional questions of the OF: If you were to own several monkeys and/or midgets, how many would you own, and what would you name them?

It is illegal to own other human beings. So midgets are out. And they prefer to be called little people.
Monkeys are incredibly time consuming as pets and are often uncontrollable once they reach sexual maturity. Many of them end up at zoos, or rescues or even destroyed. Many zoos will not take ex-pets because of their lack of normal monkey socialization. Not to mention health and behavioral problems.
If you wanted a light hearted answer you're talking to the wrong girl. I have a degree in biology and support several rescue groups and contribute to the St Louis Zoo. I don't actually contribute to any rescue groups that specialize in monkeys, but maybe I should look in to it.

Thank you for your time, and patience, Laurell. I wish you the best of luck with your work.

There is more to fantasy than what is dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio

The following is a slightly edited version of a ranting commentary that I made over at wotmania. The link will show the reasons for the post, but here is the main part of the text, since it might provide some fodder for discussion here or elsewhere.

There seems to be an attitude by many readers, or perhaps perception is a better word, that fantasy is only epic fantasy. That Tolkien is the end-all and be-all of all things fantastic. That 'fantasy' involves only 'secondary worlds' and that 'worldbuilding' involves a pseudomedieval setting with noble men (and the occasional plucky wench with big tits and ass, to be blunt), with a few pixie-like elves, doughty dwarves (or dwarfs, if you must), and evil orc-like creatures that are minions of a Dark Lord (or lords or council of merely shadowy intentions). Oh, yeah, and with a Quest, not a goal, but a sacred Quest (with phallic-like swords in play, if not The Key to Immortal Life And/Or Defeating Said Dark One/Ones/Council of Merely Shadowy Intentions) to boot! Maybe with pages and pages of turgid prose being crapped out to fill up thousands of pages of material, all just so the Hero (from central casting) may pose, strike down the foe, fuck the chick, and have everyone cheer and to smile and to throw a party with even more homoerotic hugging than a whole bundle of Hobbit hugging partners can accomplish in 10 minutes of slow-time cinematography. Blech!

Oh, that's not the perception of everyone, but it is a common misconception as to what Fantasy/fantasy means. And yet a cursory search of some of the more popular blogs, especially those of authors writing outside of the epic fantasy tradition, often will reveal a bit of hand-wringing on how to define what 'fantasy' is. It obviously can't be proto-Fascist whiteboy whooping up on Dark Lord Satan/Suge Knight in his crib, now can it? It can't be that crap that a Goodkind or a Newcombe will shit out on a yearly basis, often selling into the hundreds of thousands of copies, can it? Why can't fantasy be true-honest-to-God literature? You know, throwin' it down like Gilgamesh rocked the house 4000 years ago?

And yet in the many fine points that these bloggers and authors make about how 'fantasy' is oh-so-much more than epic phallic worshipping, there often is a point that's being overlooked. If (as they and I myself personally do) fantasy involves the imagination and if it's the birthplace of so much else, then where do we place fantasy within the wider world?

I mean, we have tens (if not hundreds) of thousands (hell, maybe even millions) of Ayn Rand-worshipping Objectivists out there. We have millions of L. Ron Hubbard idolizing Scientologists. We have sex cults in Britain that follow after the dictates of an obscure '60s fantasy novel. We have people who are disgruntled, who are dissatisfied with today's postmodern world and its implications that many reject it. Oh, some do seek a Tolkienian 'consolement' in a nebulous fantasy (often epic style, 'cause the men must be real men and the women must know their role, at least for some of the readers), while others say 'fuck it' and they just rebel. They think, "What if Marxism could be applied virtually perfectly to a society? What would it be like?" Or perhaps they ponder, "What if women were in power and the men were just the fuck toys?" Or maybe they just say the hell with it and go, "Ya know, I think having gay-friendly worlds would say a lot about our world and its issues!"

Fantasy is not merely of one form, nor is it only part and parcel of literature. It's a dialogue that we carry on with ourselves, our societies, our past, and our conceptions of the present and future. It is an artifact, a vital part of material culture, one in which there are a whole host of issues that are at stake. One cannot escape it - what you choose is based on how you choose to see the world around you. Read a Danielle Steel now and fantasize about romance. Read Stephen King and maybe be wowed by the possibilities that might be macabre at times. Read a 'safe' novel, say something by V.S. Naipaul and you'll see conflict and attempts to grasp what it means to be human.

Fantasy is merely our processing of the data of the world around us and our desires to manipulate or to change our perceived world if it becomes threatening to us. Some might say fantasy is 'bad' or 'childish,' while ironically succumbing to their own fantasy versions of the world about, bound in iron-clad rules and procedures. Fantasy is multivariable, neither fish nor fowl, neither Good nor Evil, but a means of relating our hopes and fears to an audience of others and self combined. To view it as being 'this' or 'that' just seems to short-change it and that is a pity.