Lynn Abbey
My parents might say that I started telling stories when I learned to talk and decided that I'd become a writer the day I recognized a typewriter.
My magic is always empirical-it can be analyzed and replicated.
Most readers seemed to like the never-ending conflict, but politics is not sword and sorcery, and Thieves' World, at its best, was down-and-dirty sword and sorcery. Sales were starting to drop off.
Most books don't translate successfully into movies and one of the criticisms against an author like John Grisham, whose books are regularly made into movies, is that he's actually writing screenplays, not novels.
Magical realism is based on magical magic, that is, the happening of things that cannot be explained by the characters and are not explained by the author.
Magic works differently for every author who's written for the series.
Last year I went on a Venice jag and now I'm planning a fantasy that's set in an environment that's not quite Venice but owes a lot to last year's reading.
It's possible to become so comfortable with one's style and structure that one ceases to grow.
It's only recently that the special effects industry has evolved enough to be able to handle the demands of fantasy and/or science fiction economically enough that there's enough money left over to buy a decent script.
It's harder to get stand-alone material published, but it's worth the wait and effort, and then, if you really want to do a Star Trek novel, you can pretty much dictate the terms.
It's been great to work cooperatively with a group of talented authors again, but the book world has become an unforgiving place and it remains to be seen if Thieves' World can reestablish a toehold in a sufficient number of imaginations to become a regularly scheduled product.
It's been a long time since I've written old-fashioned sword and sorcery; I'm hoping it's like riding a bicycle.
It took me about 12 years to reach my million-word mark. The challenge now is to continue to challenge myself.
In the process of defending the integrity of my story, I would clean up the structural problems without focusing on them. I've used it myself with the writers I've mentored.
In the last few years I've become more reliant on the Internet for research. I'm addicted to Google.
In my high-school sophomore English class, we were given that hoary old assignment: write a short story. The Berlin Wall had just gone up and I decided to write a short story about a group of friends whose lives had been divided.
In a general sense, all my protagonists eventually find themselves in situations so totally beyond their control that all they can do is hunker down and trust their fallible guts.
If you write, one of the questions you're always trying to answer is, Where do you get your ideas? And, if you write, you know how pointless a question this is and how difficult it is to answer.
If I want to write SF, I'll have to write it under another name.
If I aim for a short-story idea, I then get to spend the next portion of my life removing 90,000 words from what my imagination generated.