Writing is a passion. Publishing is a business.

JANNI LEE SIMNER

Interview with JANNI LEE SIMNER

Janni Lee Simner is the author of the post-apocalyptic YA faerie tales BONES OF FAERIE and FAERIE WINTER, as well as of the Icelandic-saga based THIEF EYES. She's also published four books for younger readers and more than 30 short stories, including one in the WELCOME TO BORDERTOWN anthology. BONES OF FAERIE received the 2010 Judy Goddard/Libraries Ltd. Young Adult Author Award.

What are you reading right now?

SILENCE by Michelle Sagara, which is due out next year. I love her adult SUN SWORD novels (written as Michelle West), so I'm really excited about this book, which is her first YA.

Books already out that I've loved the past few months include Karen Healey's THE SHATTERING, Megan Crewe's GIVE UP THE GHOST, Sarah Rees Brennan's THE DEMON’S LEXICON, Roseanne Parry's SECOND FIDDLE (not a fantasy, but very much about the importance of art in our lives), and Malinda Lo's HUNTRESS.

What first sparked your interest in writing?

So many things! I was the sort of kid who was always telling herself stories, so in a sense I was always a writer. I also immersed myself deeply in playing pretend games, long past the age when anyone admits to still playing them, and that was a part of becoming a writer, too. And of course, I've always been a reader. Sometimes, if you don't find that book you want to read, you have to go out and write it!

What do you love the most about writing? The least?

I most love the moments when I'm deeply immersed in the story, and the words are flowing, and the characters seem just a little bit real. I also love the revision process, taking the rough words already on the page and turning them into an actual story.

I probably least love all the waiting involved in being a writer: waiting to finish writing a book, waiting to sell it, waiting for it to come out … being a writer has forced me to learn patience, something that doesn't come to me naturally!

Do you have a writing process?

My writing process is as much a rewriting as a writing process. I don't outline ahead of time (unless I need an outline as a sales tool), and I do go through at least five drafts to get a completed book.

- The first draft is the one where I pretty much tell the wrong story. By writing the wrong story--and seeing why it's the wrong story-- I learn things I need to know about the right story.

- The second draft is the one that's sort of kind of is somewhere in the neighborhood of the right story.

- The third draft is the one where I tell the right story, but use all the wrong words.

- The fourth draft is the one where I begin finding the right words, and along the way straightening out muddled character and story arcs.

- The fifth draft is the one where I smooth out all the things that are almost there, and polish the prose more deeply as well.

On top of that, I usually do a bunch more rewrites to get the ending to click into place.

I sort of think of myself as honing in on the story as I go. With each new draft, layers get added to the story, and so every draft has a role to play in making the final book as strong as it can be.

What are your passions?

I'm a serial hobbyist, so what I'm passionate about changes over time. A few things have remained constant through the years, though: a love of writing, an interest in doing volunteer work with kids, and a love of hiking and camping and the outdoors.

What inspires you?

I draw a lot of inspiration from natural world and various places I've visited. Wherever I go, I want to understand the land I'm walking on (whether I'm in a wilderness area or in a city where that land is more hidden beneath all the layers of buildings and people who live there) and how it shapes the people who live there. I've had several books (published and to be written) begin with a landscape.

Why fantasy?

I've always read fantasy, so it never really occurred to me to write anything else! I love magic, in our world and in other worlds, for its own sake and for the things it teaches us about what it means to be human and to live and survive in our non-magical world.

I love what Jane Yolen says about fantasy in her collection of essays, TOUCH MAGIC, which I think gets to the heart of one of the things fantasy is all about:

"And for adults, the world of fantasy books returns us to the great words of power which, in order to be tamed, we have excised from our adult vocabularies. These words are the pornography of innocence, words which adults no longer use with other adults, and so we laugh at them and consign them to the nursery, fear masking as cynicism. These are the words that were forged in the earth, air, fire, and water of human existence, and the words are:
                Love. Hate. Good. Evil. Courage. Honor. Truth."

I have that posted above my desk.

Why young adult?

I've always loved coming of age stories, so I've always tended to write stories with teen protagonists who are living right on the edge of that time when everything begins to change.

It took me a while to realize those stories were YA, though--I started off assuming I was writing for adults, just with younger characters. Then I noticed how much more enthusiastic the rejection letters I was receiving from YA editors were than those I was getting from adult editors, I took another look at both my work and at the books I loved to read, and I began more consciously calling what I wrote YA.

I also have written books for younger children, along with the occasional short story for adults.

How was BONES OF FAERIE born?

BONES OF FAERIE began with an opening scene that wouldn’t let me go. I don't know where that scene came from. I do know that once I wrote it, I had to tell the rest of the story. Only I didn't know how to--I didn't know what happened next, and I also just wasn't yet a good enough writer to tell the story well. So I went off and wrote some other things, but every few years I came back to BONES OF FAERIE’s opening, until I was ready to write the book that went with it.

All told it took me 12 years from writing that opening to finish the book!

How much do the fey and magic in BONES OF FAERIE pull from folklore and how much is your own invention?

It's a mix. Ballads and stories and bits of folklore did contribute to the book, but the elements drawn from them were in many ways transformed when seen through the lens of the book's post-apocalyptic war between faeries and humans. Glamour, for instance, became much harsher in FAERIE WINTER (BONES OF FAERIE’s sequel) than in the stories where I'd seen it used, because the world in which I was using it was harsh, too. And there are other elements that are entirely my own, including the quia trees that once grew only in Faerie, and that become increasingly important with each Faerie book.

A book in which I stuck a little more closely to existing canon than in the Faerie books was THIEF EYES, which is based on my reading of the Icelandic sagas. I think how close one sticks to the known folklore depends a lot on the story being told.

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Be stubborn! Stubborn enough to keep learning, keep revising, and keep becoming a better writer; and also stubborn enough to keep submitting your work. Just because you don't sell quickly doesn't mean you won't sell. The authors who break in quickly and spectacularly are the most noticeable, but that's only one way to build a career. This is a paced game--more of a marathon than a sprint--and it's worth being in it for the long haul.

Learn the business, but keep as much focus as you can on the craft and the process of writing. That's where the joy comes from, and that's where you'll find the things to sustain you over that long haul.

Ignore any writing advice you hear that doesn't work for you, even mine. There are many ways to write, and no one way works for everyone. Try everything, keep the advice that works for you, and ditch the rest. Ultimately, you're trying to find your own way and your own processes.

Is there anything else you would like to tell us about yourself?

I like gelato. I don't like chocolate. I think the Star Wars movies should have stopped with the original trilogy, and I try to pretend the later movies never happened. I used to love unicorns, and then I hated them, but now I love them again.

I've just turned in the third and final Faerie book (from Liza's point of view, anyway) to my editor. So many years after writing BONES OF FAERIE’s opening scene, it feels like Liza and I have traveled a long way together, and I'm going to miss her.

MARIE BRENNAN

Interview with MARIE BRENNAN

Marie Brennan is an anthropologist and folklorist who shamelessly pillages her academic fields for material. Her short stories have appeared in more than a dozen print and online publications. Her newest novel, WITH FATE CONSPIRE, is the fourth book in the Onyx Court series and released August 30, 2011.

What are you reading right now?

I'm doing a big project, re-reading (and blogging about) all of Diana Wynne Jones' books, as a memorial. I think I've made it through ten of them so far, which is about a fifth of the total. She wrote a *lot* of books!  

What first sparked your interest in writing? 

Diana Wynne Jones, sort of, which dovetails nicely with the above. I know I made up stories before I started reading her work, but it was her novel FIRE AND HEMLOCK that made me decide I wanted to be a writer. It's a story about stories and about the power they can have; no wonder that left a mark.

What do you love the most about writing? The least?

"Most" would have to be the moments when it feels like the story's writing itself, because my subconscious is tossing out ideas as if pointing out what actually happened, rather than making stuff up. Those are always the best ideas, at least for me; they mean a part of my brain has figured out something important, even if the rest of me hasn't yet caught up.

"Least" is probably the fact that novel-writing is a marathon sport. I know there are people who can do binge-writing and knock out a whole book in, like, a week flat…but I'm not one of them. (If only because my hands would fall off.) It requires several months of steady work, day after day, and after a while the numbers seem to move at a snail's pace. That middle third starts to feel like a real slog sometimes, with no end in sight.

Do you have a writing process?

Everybody who writes must, by default, have a process for it. :-) Mine has been changing lately, though. It used to be that I produced near-final first drafts, but the Onyx Court books required more and more revision, just because of the complexity of what I was trying to do. And the one I'm working on right now, A NATURAL HISTORY OF DRAGONS, is breaking my usual pattern of "a thousand words a day, rain or shine" — I keep taking a day off and then writing two thousand words the next day. I'm really not sure why. But it's important first to find the process that works for you (rather than the process you think you ought to have) and second to remember that it can change. What works for one book may not work for another

What inspires you?

My academic background is in anthropology, archaeology, folklore, a lot of history classes — I like knowing about different ways of living and organizing societies. I've gotten a lot of plot ideas, especially for short stories, out of "what if there were a culture that did X?" My first bit of success with fiction, “Calling Into Silence,” came out of reading about spirit possession in sub-Saharan Africa. Character has to come into it, too — I'm not interested in writing about societies in the general sense — but I always think up characters in context, having particular roles and problems that come out of the culture they live in. And that interest goes beyond the "colorful" value of those differences. We have a built-in tendency to assume the way we live is somehow "natural," that our way makes sense and everybody else's way is weird. The truth is, it's all weird. The more time you spend looking at alternatives and thinking about what they would be like, the more you see that…and the more it opens up the chance of you doing things differently, too, or at least understanding why other people might. That matters.

Why fantasy?

Because I like it? :-) It just feels to me like it has more freedom. I could write stories set in other parts of the world (and I have, sometimes), but then you have an obligation to represent them accurately, which means you maybe can't tell the story you want to tell. And fantasy means that the experimentation I described above can go beyond tinkering with the mundane details of the world and into the metaphysics. Mesoamerican cultures believed that blood sacrifice was necessary to keep the cosmos functioning; what if they were right? How does that change the ethics that we take for granted?

How was MIDNIGHT NEVER COME born? How about WARRIOR and WITCH?

I've described the genesis of both in fairly extensive detail on my website; MIDNIGHT NEVER COME was born from a roleplaying game I ran, and the doppelganger books grew out of a random collusion of two very small ideas (see the "About the Novel" section).  

Did MIDNIGHT NEVER COME require a lot of research? 

Vast, vast mountains of it, that seemed to get bigger with each subsequent book. I have my entire research bibliography posted on my site, along with the journal of all my trips to London. Partly that was because I feel a genuine obligation to get things right, when I'm talking about real people and real history, but partly it was because researching really fed the story, as much as it restricted it; I kept turning up little details that I never would have invented on my own, which took the narrative in really cool directions.  

How did writing the MIDNIGHT NEVER COME series and the WARRIOR series differ?

Did I mention the research? :-) They're very different kinds of stories, too; the doppelganger books are more about adventure, though they have a side order of politics, whereas the Onyx Court is much more political in nature. The latter is a lot more like writing a chess match, with more moves planned out in advance and more need for me to keep several narrative balls in the air at once. I also think of the Onyx Court as urban fantasy, albeit of a historical sort, because ultimately the fact that they're set in London, and follow the way the city changed through the centuries, is crucial to the story. Even the most important bits of the setting for the doppelganger books never came close to that kind of central importance.

Why did you divide MIDNIGHT NEVER COME into acts?

Honestly, it came about because I knew I would need to skip over a chunk of time partway through. Deven had to spend some time working for Walsingham before things got complicated; it just didn't make sense that Walsingham would give that kind of trust to somebody he'd only just taken on. And the process of establishing Lune in her new position would have necessitated a kind of prose montage, that wouldn't have been very interesting. So given that I was going to skip forward, it made sense to have some kind of division. Then I realized that the 1588 bit was likely to be approximately a fifth of the book, and of course plays in that period were often divided into five acts. Once I sat down to consider how the five-act structure works, it turned out to map pretty well to the structure of the novel, so I went with it. What got interesting was deciding how to divide up the later books. Each one is different, but they all have some kind of part setup. IN ASHES LIE is in four parts because of the four days of the Great Fire, so that felt like the obvious choice. A STAR SHALL FALL, on the other hand…I went with seven because the number recurs so much in alchemy, but it turns out there's a good reason that seven-part narratives aren't common; it just doesn't feel natural. That one was a lot harder to wrestle into shape. It was a relief to go back to something very familiar, the three-part structure, for WITH FATE CONSPIRE. 

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

 

Advice of that kind tends to fall into two categories: brief platitudes and really lengthy rambling. On the platitude side, I'd say write more, revise more, send out what you've revised, and have patience. (It sounds trite, but it's true.) On the rambling side, I've got a lot of essays on my site dissecting the craft and business and philosophy of writing; it's only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what I could say, but I keep adding new essays all the time.

METTE IVIE HARRISON

Interview with METTE IVIE HARRISON

Mette Ivie Harrison is the author of MIRA, MIRROR, THE PRINCESS AND THE HOUND, THE PRINCESS AND THE BEAR, and THE PRINCESS AND THE SNOWBIRD. Her new novel, TRIS AND IZZIE, will be out in October with Egmont. She has a PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Princeton University, and she is a competitive triathlete who has competed in 3 Ironmans. She has five children and lives in Utah, where she knits during church and reads anytime she can get away with it.

What are you reading right now?

I spent several years reading 200-300 YA novels a year, trying to give myself a crash course in YA. I never read YA much as a teen, and I missed a lot of great books. But the last year, I've found myself turning more and more to mystery. I've been on an Elizabeth George junket. I tend to read everything in a series in one great big gulp, and then look around for more to read. I've also loved Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone series, Robert Parker's books, Anne Perry's Victorian mysteries and her new series set after WWI. I was like this as a teen, when I spent one memorable summer tracking down every novel about Perry Mason ever written. That was after my Sherlock Holmes obsession, and before my Isaac Asimov obsession. My mom kept wondering if I wouldn't like to read something else for a change. Nope. I think this is the way that I learn. In a couple of years, I'll be done with mysteries and on to something else. I read about 10,000 romance novels as a later teen and I haven't read any romances for years.

What first sparked your interest in writing?  

 

I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was in Kindergarten, when I wrote my first children's story about a dragon. I still have it. I don't remember ever not wanting to be a writer, or not wanting to spend just about every waking moment experiencing story in one form or another. I did spend about six years getting a PhD in German literature, and I focused more on writing about story then than on creating my own. It was my final year of my degree, all the pressureof finishing my dissertation on me, that I went back to my own stories. I didn't intend to make a career of it then. I had heard too many stories about how impossible it is to make a living at writing. But I think I was mostly afraid, and it was only when all the other possible career choices blew up that I discovered courage because I had nothing left to lose.

What do you love the most about writing? The least?

I still love the first draft the most. Yes, it takes a kind of courage to stare at the blank page. And yes, I have to learn to turn off my internal editor every day anew. But I like playing with my own characters and my own world, making up my own rules, asking "what if?" My kids laugh at me now, because I have novel ideas all the time, and they know me well enough that when I talk about something I'm interested in appropriating for my own, I think about it in a real-life setting, and then say, "And I add magic." I struggle with the professional business end of writing. Not accounting or anything like that. I was always good at math at school and I don't procrastinate most things. But I don't feel that I'm good at social interaction at events, or promoting myself. There is a part of me that is a little frustrated by the idea that writers are becoming entertainers, almost stand up comics. I got into this gig because I wanted to sit in my office and write stories about people, not travel around talking about my books. I have had to find ways that I do love to interact, so I write blogs about what I care about at the moment, whether it is triathlon or women characters on TV shows or parenting. I also love twitter.

Do you have a writing process?

I try to write about 4 hours a day, generally in the morning after my kids go to school. In the summer, this goes down to maybe 2-3 hours a day. I do have an office, but I can work almost anywhere if I'm rested enough. I have a pretty regular schedule of sleep, exercise, and eating. I also have 5 kids who run in and out of my office. I just work around that. I also try to set aside a few hours a day for reading. I believe that the more you read, the more intuitive the structure of a novel is to you. I have tried many times to outline a novel, but usually it works for about one chapter and then the outline is useless. I have started to try to write a first sentence to the next chapter before turning away from the computer for the day, so I don't start with nothing the next day. The hardest thing about writing is dealing with fear. It doesn't ever go away, but I think I have learned to work around it. I don't often know where a story is going, except in some part of my unconscious that doesn't talk to the rest of me. I feel like I just sit down every day and let my characters tell me what they would do next. But it's also true that I try to have lots of surprises in each book and end a chapter with something that I myself didn't expect. Which is a hard thing to do, surprising yourself with your own writing. What are your passions? I love triathlon, and I am passionate about exercise and eating and health in general. I feel so angry when I hear people say that they just "can't" run or they weren't born athletic. I wasn't born athletic, either. But persistence in athletics, like persistence in writing has paid off for me. I feel passionate, too, about adults trying new things. This idea that when you get older, you've found already what you're going to be good at is bunk. I suppose as a writer, I am always reading and researching new things, so that is part of the reason why I believe this. But I didn't do my first triathlon until 34. Before that, I had only been running for one year. I have also learned how to play the piano fairly competently, as an adult. What inspires you?

Oh, everything. There are story ideas all over. I tell people who ask me how I get my ideas that I am usually more concerned with pushing ideas away. I certainly don't write them down at night if I wake up with a dream. If it doesn't keep bugging me to write it, good. I have a long list of novels I want to get to and I'd rather it didn't get any longer. I will say that I don't believe that writers ever come up with anything new. Maybe others are not as conscious of it as I am, but we steal all our ideas from other books or TV shows or people we know or stories in the newspaper. Then we make them completely our own if we do our job well. I started watching Dr. Who in the last year, fell in love with it, and then decided that I wanted to steal some of the story effects in the episodes I liked best. So I have a book I'm working on that came from that. And we also went to London (my two oldest daughters and I) to see David Tennant and Catherine Tate in Much Ado About Nothing and I'm working on a book retelling that. And I have a book that's a retelling of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband called AN IDEAL BOYFRIEND. Some things turn out well and some don't. I'm trying to learn that as a writer, my job isn't to judge which ones are good, but simply to let myself be a tool for the creativity that runs through me. Sounds zen, but it works for me.

Why fantasy?

I read fantasy a lot as a tween, but by the time I was 12, was firmly into adult fiction, reading classics and "worthy, great literature." I didn't get back to reading fantasy until I was in grad school. Then I would have to read the fantasy books in the library because I was afraid to check them out, paranoid that my professors would somehow be getting a list of my library books each week. I have heard a lot of people say they just don't "get" fantasy. Well, there is a lot of fantasy out there. And it's very different. Maybe you really wouldn't like any fantasy, but I doubt it. If so, I think I feel sorry for you. Fantasy to me is just a way of talking about the same things as realistic fiction, but with the metaphor of fantasy. You can talk about feminism in a way you wouldn't be able to otherwise, or about how humans are really still animals, or about love triangles, or anything you want.

Why young adult?

I didn't really pick young adult. It picked me. By that, I mean that I simply wrote the stories I wanted to write, some with adult characters, some with young adult characters, and a lot of them are crossover and could be either one. I feel like I write in the seam between adult and young adult, and sometimes that means certain novels will never work for either target audience. MIRA, MIRROR is about a hundred year old mirror who wants to be human again. THE PRINCESS AND THE HOUND was rejected by Viking because Prince George was "too old" and the "marriage plot" didn't work for YA. But it sold to another editor who saw it differently.

How was THE PRINCESS AND THE HOUND born?

I originally wrote THE PRINCESS AND THE HOUND as a retelling of the Princess and the Pea, but the princess came in, bedraggled and dripping water, and she had this hound with her that she wouldn't let anyone take from her. Then the story became a mystery about what was going on with the princess and the hound, told by the prince's point of view. I never intended for it to be a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, though I can see in retrospect how it was read that way. I thought of it when I sent it out as very dark and strange and probably unsellable. I wanted it to feel like a fairy tale retelling, but of a tale that no one could find in any book.

Can you tell us about your new book TRIS AND IZZIE?

TRIS AND IZZIE is a project I had in the back of my mind since 2002, when I quit my position teaching German at the university level and turned to writing full time. I thought about it off and on, but I could never see how I could do it. It felt like it was biting off too much. It took almost six years for me to get the courage to sit down and actually start the thing. And even then, I wrote about a hundred pages and put it aside for a couple of years. When my editor Ruth Katcher (at Egmont) was asking about what different projects I had lying around (she knows me well enough to know that there are always projects lying around), I mentioned this one to her and she instantly wanted to see it. Then I had to go back and rewrite it and figure out how to finish it. I think it took that ten year period for me to stop being intimidated by the subject matter and not take myself so seriously. It's the first book I've written that I think is actually funny. The idea is that Izzie is a high school junior who has a perfect life. Her boyfriend is Mark King, basketball star, and the only thing that is wrong is that her best friend Branna doesn't have a boyfriend. So Izzie decides to mix up one of her mother's love philtres and give it to Branna and a suitable guy at school. Then this new boy shows up, Tristan, and he takes the philtre, but Mark is also reaching for it, so in an impulsive moment, Izzie grabs it and drinks it. So she is in love with the wrong guy completely and she feels like it isn't real. She fights her own feelings for a long time, and in the midst, there is a larger fantasy adventure where Tris and Izzie have to fight off an evil magic plot that could destroy the world. But it's heavy on romance, and my own experience of high school and having a boyfriend that I truly fell in love with and married later.

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Just keep writing. There is no teacher better than experience. I wrote 20 novels before I got my first one published. I don't know anyone who has had so many rejections on so many books before being published. I continued to believe that I just wasn't good enough yet. And by good enough, I mean so good that an editor couldn't say no to me. Not just as good as what I see on the shelf. Those books are from authors who generally have an audience already. You have to be better than they are. I think that a lot of beginning authors keep honing their first "baby" thinking that they can make it better. It's not always true. A lot of the time, the problems in one book are just no soluble. So move on to another one. Keep learning and growing with each book you write.

Is there anything else you would like to tell us about yourself?

I love Jane Austen and someday will figure out how to write my Jane Austen with magic book. Maybe. I also knit, crochet, and quilt and do other sorts of needlework. I remember taking a class from a female professor at Princeton and for the first time feeling comfortable bringing my knitting with me. We talked about the importance of needlework in novels by women. I thought about that for a long time afterward and eventually wrote an (still unpublished) academic essay about needlework and secret writing in Jane Austen's novels. One of the examples was Jane Fairfax's letters to her aunt, which are written crossways on the paper and hard to read. This made me immediately think of knitting and how women's literary messages are often hidden and can't be read except by other women who know the secret code.

JOSH LANGSTON

Interview with JOSH LANGSTON 

Josh Langston has been a writer all his life, beginning as a child in Minneapolis, MN, and continuing to his current residence in Marietta, GA, which he shares with his bride of nearly four decades, their two undisciplined mutts, and an indeterminate number of over-sized goldfish. A graduate of Georgia State University with a degree in Journalism, Josh's writing tastes quickly shifted away from non-fiction. His short stories have been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. His novel, DRUIDS, co-authored with Barbara Galler-Smith of Edmonton, Alberta, debuted in October, 2009. The first title in a series of historical fantasies, DRUIDS is set in the first century BC. The second book, CAPTIVES, released in May, 2011. 

What are you reading right now?

LIVE WIRE, by Harlan Coben. His series about Myron Bolitar, sports agent, former basketball star, and all-around good guy, has given me more hours of entertainment than I can count. I started listening to audiobook versions while driving from Georgia to upstate New York where our son lives. Coben's characters, both the ensemble cast and those who appear only in a single book, are just plain fun. He's a genius at developing quirky characters. I read Karl Hiassen for much the same reason. While I strive to improve my craft by reading brilliant writers like these two, I get the added bonus of great stories told well. 

What first sparked your interest in writing?  

I loved to read as a child, and I was blessed with parents who encouraged me to do it. My father was a writer/director of commercial motion pictures and often worked at home. The odor of pipe smoke and the rattle of typewriter keys were impressed in my memory long before I could read. Probably before I could walk! My first attempt at fiction was a retelling of the Robinson Crusoe story using a cast of raisens brought to life by some mysterious (and now long forgotten) means. I think I was ten. Dad didn't say a word as I labored away at his Olivetti portable (wonky Shift key and all). I managed nearly an entire page before I burned out. Such are the staggering demands of the writing life. 

What do you love the most about writing? The least? 

The absolute best part of a writing project is typing "The End." The simultaneous feelings of pride, relief, and accomplishment are addictive. For me, much of the work of writing is simply that: work. When it's going well I can lose myself in the characters or the crisis. There have been a few characters whose fictive deaths actually had me close to tears. I enjoy working with the same kinds of characters readers like to read about: profoundly evil bad guys and sympathetic good guys. Taking the time to make them matter to readers also makes them matter to me. The trick is to cultivate the reader's acceptance of what motivates a character to do the things she does. That takes time and planning. I'd much rather just jump to the "Ta-Da, All Done!" stage without having to do all the work. Sadly, I haven't figured out how to do that. 

Do you have a writing process?  

I don't follow a particular schedule, although I tend to be very narrowly focused when I'm working on a project. Writing DRUIDS and the books that follow it required a very strict process, since two authors were involved at every stage. We developed detailed outlines and worked out the entire story before the actual writing began. From time to time one of us would stumble into a character or event not covered in the original plan. We would then stop writing and decide whether the issue warranted a change to the road map. If so, we went back through the plan and completely revised it to account for the new element. The process was involved, at times annoying, and undoubtedly resulted in vastly better books. 

When working on my own, the process is quite different. For one thing, I don't have to bargain with someone else, convince them to trust my instincts or, hardest of all, trust their instincts. I typically dig into a story based on an idea and notes thrown together at odd moments. For the last three novels, all contemporary thrillers, I wrote the first half sans outline, and then stopped long enough to chart all the steps needed to reach the end. This seems to work well for me, and I'll very likely stick with it. 

Most writers I know will admit to a certain lack of discipline. I'm certainly not an exception. Having a process one can follow easily can go a long way toward building discipline. If you don't already have a process of your own, start by removing the games from your workstation. That's probably the only advantage typewriters have over PCs. 

What are your passions? 

Writing definitely qualifies as a passion. I'm serious about it, whereas I tend to joke about pretty much everything else in my life. I'm blessed with a wonderful spouse who keeps me grounded and inspired at the same time. We have two kids and two grandkids, thus far, and I'm pretty passionate about them all. Beyond that I enjoy playing golf, listening to music, and drinking bourbon, though none of those things could be termed "passions." 

What inspires you?

I'm an absolute sucker for stories of perseverance leading to success. That said, I've never read a Horatio Alger novel, nor am I likely to. (I'm not averse to all 19th century lit; Dickens and Twain are faves.) I admire self-reliance. When I read news stories or web-spread tales of people who've made it despite handicaps or great personal risk, my faith in people is validated. In real life there are many kinds of heroes, and not all of them are human. And if art really does imitate life, fictional heroes should be at least as diverse. I'm also greatly inspired by acts of love, no matter how corny. Macaroni art bestowed upon me by a proud 5-year old will get to me every time. 

Why fantasy? 

I've always written stories with a fantasy element, because my grasp of science is, well, pretty thin. Otherwise I'd be cranking out SF all day, every day. One of my all-time favorite authors is Robert Heinlein. He was a master at using one clearly impossible element to change his fictional landscape. Readers only had to buy into that one idea, and suddenly the story opportunities multiplied exponentially. And yet the "What If" trick has been around a long, long time. It predates writing. Storytellers were using it to entertain audiences long before anyone figured out how to jot things down. 

In DRUIDS we adopted a single fantasy element, woadsleep, which among other things, has the effect of putting characters in a state of suspended animation. But it's not what drives the story. History and the characters do that. Woadsleep makes it a great deal more interesting. That said, one of the challenges we faced was limiting its use. Scarcity enhances value. The same applies to fantasy. If everyone can perform magic, its value is diminished. You have a problem? Just wave your magic wand. Yawn. 

Make things too easy, and no one cares. Nor should they. 

J.K. Rowling deals with this in delightful ways. Magic is plentiful in her world, but it's also difficult to use. Not even the esteemed Harry Potter can just pick up that magic wand and expect good things to happen. Rowling's built a fabulously successful franchise based largely on that concept. 

One of the great things about "fantasy" is that it encompasses a panorama of story types. My new novels are contemporary thrillers, but they could just as easily be labeled fantasy, or, in a pinch, science fiction. Why? Because the title character -- A LITTLE PRIMITIVE -- is two feet tall. He's not a pixie or a leprechaun or a gremlin. He's just a guy with a very different world view. 

How was DRUIDS born?  

Sometime in the 90's, my DRUIDS writing partner, Barbara Galler-Smith, and I wrote a fantasy novella set in the year 800 (about the time Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor). It involved a strange little man named Spaldeen whose wood carvings came to life. As a pure fantasy story, it worked just fine. But the more we thought about it, the more we realized that there was a much greater story to be told. It wasn't enough that Spaldeen could "feel" an odd life force in the wood he carved. We needed to know how that life force got there. In the process of working out the back-story, we wrote an entire novel. 

We were quite pleased with it even though it didn't completely answer all the questions leading up to Spaldeen's story. So, we wrote a sequel. 

I can't say whether or not the second book was better because of the plot or because our writing skills had improved. Either way, it turned out to be more compelling than the first book. And it was entirely due to one character, who was so intriguing that we absolutely had to go back and tell her story. 

After a marathon bout of argument, counter-argument, and soul-searching, we opted to re-write book one. So, technically speaking, DRUIDS was the third book we wrote, even though it's the first book in the series. We then revised and expanded book two, CAPTIVES (which was released in May, 2011), and went on to write the concluding volume, WARRIORS, which is scheduled to come out in May, 2012.  

What was it like collaborating on a book? 

It was terrifying. And exhilarating. Demanding and liberating. Frustrating, yet educational. Barb and I brought different skill sets to the project. In the beginning it was fairly easy to assign tasks based on strengths. Back then, Barb's included a profound grasp of Celtic history and the ability to write beautifully descriptive narrative. My strengths lay in plotting and dialog. Together we had a reasonably well-stocked fiction-writing tool kit. 

Over time, our skills improved. I studied ancient history, particularly the writing of Plutarch and Julius Caesar, and Barb enhanced her plotting and dialog skills. By the time we started work on WARRIORS, we had both matured as writers, and our skill sets were more redundant than complementary. 

One thing that never changed was our appreciation for, and dedication to, the outline. Had we not worked so hard to detail point of view, what the reader needed to learn, and why the scene was critical to the evolution of the story, we would never have finished. Somewhere along the way our collaboration would have ended up in the trashbin that houses most such efforts. 

The bottom line: If you can't check your ego at the door, don't even bother to attempt a collaboration. 

Did DRUIDS require a lot of research? 

Absolutely. Unfortunately, the ancient Celts weren't terribly keen on making written records about themselves, even though they had their own unique writing system (which doubled as a sign language, by the way, and was quite possibly the first ever devised). So, virtually everything we know about the Celts was written by non-Celts, and most of them were sworn enemies. Julius Caesar is the best example. His commentary on the Roman campaign in Gaul is amazingly detailed. It's also amazingly self-serving. But then, Caesar was the prototypical politician. Imagine using any of today's most popular pols as a definitive source about anything. Time hasn't diminished that problem at all. 

Okay then, how to proceed? First off, we slewed the entire series toward a Celtic viewpoint. Our thinking was that history is recorded by the victors, therefore the Roman world view predominates, and there are countless volumes of historically oriented fiction which favor the Roman point of view. Why add to it? So, DRUIDS and its sequels were devoted to the Celtic perspective. We didn't cheat on the history; we just tried to look at it from the losers' angle. What we discovered was that Julius Caesar and Adolph Hitler had a great deal in common. 

The series contains many detailed and highly ritualized ceremonies. All of that is pure conjecture. In those rare instances where we had some concrete historical evidence for how things were done, we strove to keep our narrative in line with the latest anthropological discoveries. (For instance, websites devoted to British recreations of ancient Celtic villages were extremely helpful.) 

Beyond that, it was a blend of history and imagination. We had Plutarch's notes on the Roman expatriot general, Sertorius. We knew the brilliant kind of man he was, and the extraordinary lengths he went to in order to enlist the aid of the Celts living in ancient Spain. Working our characters into that historical perspective was not only challenging and educational, but fun! Admittedly, we got lucky. 

I should add a disclaimer here, which relates to the whole issue of research. Just because you had to dig through a mountain of miserably boring material doesn't mean that your reader must, too! Your job is to pick through that great hulking garbage pile to salvage the jewels your readers really want to see. 

One of the most rewarding aspects of our historical research was the discovery of little things into which we could plug our fictional characters. For example, there is ample evidence to suggest that Julius Caesar developed the first alphabetic cipher -- a way to disguise the meaning of his written directives. In CAPTIVES, we took the liberty of giving that invention to one of our characters, who used it as a bargaining chip with Caesar. Could it have happened that way? Why not? Did it happen that way? Who knows? That's why it's called fiction. 

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors? 

To quote "Galaxy Quest," one of my favorite films, "Never give up. Never surrender!" Treat your creativity like any other muscle in your body: exercise it. If you don't, it will atrophy. Writers write. Do it every day. When you're not writing, you should be reading. Or taking care of your Honey Do list -- never ignore that either! 

Finally, if you haven't already, join a writer's group. You'll learn more from giving critiques than receiving them. And when you eventually make it to stardom, help out a beginner.