Shadow and Betrayal (101 page)

I’ve been writing most of my life. I’d been actively sending out work for publication for about ten years before I started selling short stories, and then another decade between selling my first short story and the first novel coming out. Seeing my first real book in the bookstores was oddly anticlimactic. By the time it came out, I was writing the third book in the series and working on some side projects. Looking back, twenty years of not having a book out required that I find some real, sustaining joy in doing the work for its own sake. The goal was always to be published, but it was never the endpoint.

There are some structural differences. Stories that can’t be told at shorter lengths become possible as you get longer. And the ones that can be encompassed by five or six thousand words become also become impossible at twenty or a hundred or a quarter million. That said, the immediate issues - how to make the dialogue interesting, how to evoke a location, when to show and when to tell - are pretty similar.

The Long Price Quartet was a couple of things. First off, it was my journeyman project. I went in having written three previous book-length stories, and aware that I wanted to learn better how to do them. It was also my first real experiment with epic fantasy. I wanted to try a structure that could contrast the epic scale of traditional fantasy with the epic scale of a single, normal lifetime.

It was originally a short story that I thought was complete in itself. When it became clear that the story was going to be much, much bigger, it took some more work. That first story became the prologue of the first book, almost unchanged from its original form.

I outline along the way, but every outline is provisional. For the whole project, I knew the overall shape I wanted, and what the last scene would be. As I approached each individual story, I’d figure out the ending I was aiming for. It’s sort of like longdistance driving. I knew I was going from Los Angeles to Chicago, so I knew where I was going, but I didn’t plan out each individual turn and stop along the way.

I have the intention of a set routine. I drop the darling child off at daycare, and head over to a print shop that my parents have behind their house. I spend from about eight thirty to lunchtime working, break for a sandwich, then back for another session until mid aftemoon, when it’s time to retrieve the kid. In practice, the world intrudes. But that’s what I aim for.

My experience isn’t so much the characters surprising me, as much as I have a good idea of how everything fits together, and I’m o~en a little wrong. I could be wrong about this, but I think the difference is more about how a writer thinks through a story. My first draft is how I think the story through. Other people think it through by writing detailed outlines. I suspect it’s the same process with differences in style more than substance.

That was there from the start. I wanted to do something to reset people’s expectations. I wasn’t trying for a traditional epic fantasy, and I thought that would be one way to alert readers that this one might be a little different.

I stole it from a Walter Jon Williams short story. It’s okay, he knows I took it, and he’s cool with it. He had a far future setting in which people used mudras as inflection. I thought it was a brilliant touch, so I took it and expanded on it so that it stood as almost a second language. And then S. M. Stirling took it from me for use in a novel called In the Court of the Crimson Kings. But it’s okay. I know he took it, and I’m cool with it.

I do. It’s pretty involved, but the short form goes like this: Fantasy is, at heart, involved with nostalgia and the (sometimes imperfect) healing of the world. We are in a place as a world community in which nostalgia and healing are profoundly comforting ideas.

A couple, and they bother me. First off, I think there’s a strong trend toward emotional darkness. I can even make an argument that I’m part of that. I think it’s a mistake to equate violence and ‘grittiness’ with realism. The other is the infinitely postponed conclusion. I believe that good stories end.

Not really. I know a lot of folks who are, but I really don’t understand what the brass ring is that we’d be reaching for. It isn’t fame or money, or even cultural influence. J. K. Rowling has proven that. If recognition by an elite doesn’t get you anything other than recognrtion by that elite, that’s an argument that the elite is becoming inconsequential. That we are part of a living, vital, popular literature is why folks like Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson, and Margaret Atwood have started borrowing our ideas. Literature
qua
literature is in real danger of going the way of professional poetry.

No end of them. David Eddings as read by my sixteen-year-old self. George R. R. Martin. Dorothy Sayers. Camus, WalterTevis. Scott Westerfeld. Enrique Anderson Imbert. Robert B. Parker. Jane Austen. I could go on for days, really.

I usually read something other than what I’m writing at the moment. So when I’m busy with epic fantasy stuff, I’ll read mystery or horror or mainstream literature or history or science. I enjoy the genre, but I read like an omnivore.

I’m lucky that I live in a community with a lot of working writers. The group I hang out with talks about our work with each other, up to and including having planning sessions to work through structural issues and brainstorming plotlines and characters for work at the very beginning of its life. I don’t think I do my best work in isolation. Having other minds to spark against makes me better.

I have fantasies about going back for a Masters degree in Public Health. I’m too old now to go to medical school, but public health is where MDs go when they burn out and want to do something that actually makes a difference. Epidemiology in particular turns me on.

Well, I have a new fantasy series that I’m getting ready to pitch, an urban fantasy series that I’m writing under pseudonym, a mystery series I’d like to spin up, and some short stories I’ve promised to write. I think I have enough to keep me off the street corners for a while yet.