Taylor was on the last leg of her book tour promoting Daughter of Smoke and Bone when I met her at Copperfield’s Books in Petaluma, California. Taylor attended the Santa Rosa Junior College, just up the road from Petaluma, and graduated from Berkeley with a degree in English, so she is practically a local, even though she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her artist husband Jim and their daughter Clementine.

She spent a few minutes with me, discussing growing up, reading and writing. I asked what her favorite book was when she was a child, and she wasn’t sure she had one. Taylor grew up as a Navy kid, moving from place to place in Europe, and didn’t feel the service library for kids was that good. She remembers reading a lot of Madeleine L’Engle. “And Forever. I remember reading Forever, by Judy Blume,” she said. “And a lot of teen romances. They were sweet and clean.”

Taylor said that as a teenager in Orange County, she had no cool place to hang out; no cafés or music places, or even good bookstores then. “The teenagers hung out in the parking lot of the In And Out Burger,” she said. “One of the great things about Portland is that there are so many things for young people to do.” In part, she created the Poison Kitchen, one of the colorful locations in Daughter of Smoke and Bone, as a gift to her younger self; a cool place to hang.

Since I had just read Daughter of Smoke and Bone, (read my review) I had a few questions for Laini about the book. I was curious about the “tooth fairy” theme (teeth exchanged for wishes) and Laini addressed this during her presentation. “When I knew what the teeth were for,” she said, “I knew I had a book.” I had other questions, too, so we discussed them by email:

Marion: Prague plays a big part in Daughter of Smoke and Bone, especially in the beginning. Have you been to Prague or is this an imagining? If you have not, what resources did you use to develop the city?

Laini: I have been to Prague and love it! I went first in 1996, then again in 2004, this time to research a graphic novel with my husband Jim. Our first graphic novel, The Drowned, had just come out and we were plotting our second — which we never ended up doing because I decided to finish writing my first novel Blackbringer instead. So, flash forward to 2008 when I was trying to choose a setting for this new story that would become Daughter of Smoke and Bone: Prague was really the perfect location. Sadly, you are right that there is no Poison Kitchen. I made it up in pure wish fulfillment on behalf of my own teenage self who had no cool cafes to hang out in! Incidentally, I had not yet been to Marrakesh when I wrote the book, but pieced together my picture of it from narrative accounts, blogs, photos, and Youtube videos.

Marion: You seem like a truly original voice not only in the YA fantasy field but in fantasy generally. Do you have influences? Who are they?

Laini: Influences … I’m a fan of Angela Carter, and other writers very gifted with prose (and weird, highly original stories) like Margo Lanagan and Kelly Link and Neil Gaiman. Harry Potter was transformative for me in reminding me, after college, that fantasy was what I had always loved and what had made me a reader. I also love Philip Pullman and Garth Nix. Their fantasy creations — daemons and the necromancer’s bells, respectively — are ideas I wished I had come up with myself!

Marion: This is not a question, and it’s a hope, not a wish. Zusana is a delightful character and I hope we will see more of her in the upcoming books. Karou, a delightful character too, is a little more constrained by the plot, while Zusana has more freedom. Does this make her easier or harder to write?

Laini: Just about the only thing I have been freely giving away about book 2 is that you WILL see more of Zuzana! There was just no way she wasn’t going to barge her way in J. Seriously, Zuzana is such a necessary character, for the levity and brightness she brings to the narrative. It’s not that I shy from darkness, obviously, but I want there to be fun and richness and humor. I want these books to be places the reader wants to LIVE, and if they are purely dark and tortured … who wants to go there? Zuzana is a joy to write, one of those characters who just kind of leap onto the page like it’s a stage built for HER, and I’m so sorry I had to kill her off in book 2 … Ha ha. Just kidding. Maybe.

Marion: Lately it seems I’ve read a lot of YA with sad endings. That may be a coincidence but I don’t think so. Daughter of Smoke and Bone has a tragic ending. Do you agree? It is just where the book ends as a part of the overall story, or do you have a point to make with the sad ending? Why do you think YA may be moving into a “sad” phase?

Laini: I’m not trying to make a point with “the sad” and honestly, I’m not always a fan of that! I can think of books where it felt unnecessary. (I agree with you it’s happening a lot!) I think you can look to Lips Touch for my overall sensibility: three stories, two happy endings. I want my characters to be happy. Oh, not right away, of course… they have to earn it! I’m not certain what kind of happiness Karou can achieve, if any (or at least, I’m not telling!) but I am in no way committed to tragedy. The ending of Daughter of Smoke and Bone was really the only possible ending, the only possible break, and I knew I was leading up there, and I knew it was right, but there was a part of me that hesitated a little. But only a little.

Marion: In one passage in Daughter of Smoke and Bone, you mention that various clans and tribes of chimera, even those who were enemies, were driven together into this one city by the seraphim. That mirrors the experience of several Native American tribes during the Indian wars, where hereditary enemies were pushed together onto reservations. Did you know that and was that a deliberate comment, or was it just the natural extension of the events in the book?

Laini: Well, I did think about various historical models, yes (and thank you), but in this case it’s an envisioning rather of: supposing the Native Americans hadn’t been corralled together by the enemy, but rather had chosen to band together against the onslaught and had successfully protected their own territory as one great tribe, for centuries. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a powerful scenario to me, and one you might see more of in the trilogy…

Thanks to Laini Taylor for fitting me into her tight schedule! Read our reviews of all of Laini Taylor’s work.

Justin: First of I would like to point out that The Explorer’s Guide to Drawing Fantasy Creatures is not just an instructional book, it’s an incredible piece of art in itself — so much beautiful stuff in there! To see the artwork and then the processes behind the pieces was a real treat for me. I’m not much of an artist. I consider using more than three colors on a miniature to be an accomplishment. I really enjoyed The Explorer’s Guide for reasons beyond its instructional material. How much was the art “fan” and not just the aspiring artist on your mind when putting together The Explorer’s Guide?

Emily: Thank you for your complements on my book and for the chance to talk with you! I appreciate your comments on the book’s value as an art book in addition to being an instructional book. My focus was on making a nice-looking book that would be helpful to aspiring artists. When working on The Explorer’s Guide to Drawing Fantasy Creatures, art fans were on my mind as much as they would be with my other projects. It has always been my hope that my work touches at least one person in some way, so I pour everything I can into each painting.

I always try to do the best work I can on every project I take on. I do this for my art director and audience, but I also do it for myself. As the saying goes, I am often my toughest critic! This book was probably the most personal project I have done in my professional career up to this point because the decisions about what to include were almost entirely up to me. While there is always room for creativity in the illustration field, there are requirements that need to be fulfilled for each job. Character and creature descriptions need to be followed or the action of a scene needs to match the story. There is always room for artistic license, but considering the client’s needs is essential. In this case, once my proposal was accepted and I knew I was going to be working on a how-to book on creatures, the rest was up to me. I thank IMPACT and my editors for allowing me to approach the art in the way I saw fit.

Justin: Some artists have a hard time communicating their processes, and even fewer are able to teach them. You do both very well, so I wonder: has a book like this been something you’ve always wanted to do?

Emily: Thank you for your compliments on what has been a new endeavor for me. I honestly never imagined I would write a how-to-draw book. I was lucky to have met an editor from IMPACT Books at one of my appearances at Gen Con Indy, which I have been attending for the past several years to display and promote my other fantasy work for clients like Wizards of the Coast and Cricket Magazine. Soon after returning home, I found myself discussing a contract for a book deal!

I like sharing and critiquing art with friends who are fellow artists and thought that someday in the future it might be fulfilling to teach art in some capacity, though I did not imagine doing it in book form. I found I really enjoyed the process of making the book, especially as I worked on the “Exploring the Basics” and “Creating Your Creature” chapters, because I wanted to impart as much of the information that I had learned at art school and over the past ten years as a professional illustrator as I could to young artists. I tried to tap into the things I would have loved to learn when I was a beginner; concepts that I still find helpful and use to create my own work every day.

A source of inspiration to me when working on The Explorer’s Guide was How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. I had this book in middle school and the techniques suggested for sketching interesting poses and powerful gestures changed the way I thought about drawing characters. Preston Blair’s animation books were also important. These books gave me a jump start in learning about drawing dynamic figures before I even sat down at my first figure drawing session. When writing my book, I also wanted to encourage readers to take what they’ve learned from the demonstrations in my book and explore their own ideas; to not feel boxed in by what I have done. It was important to me (even if a bit messy in some spots) to attempt to express in the demos a “natural” way of constructing drawings to match more closely to the way I frequently build up a drawing. There are so many ways to approach art, I wanted to not only show what I would do or how I did it, but also let the reader find their own way of working.

Justin: I’ve read that you use traditional methods to create your artwork. Using pencils and paints rather than a Wacom tablet and healthy selection of Photoshop filters. It’s seems the digital/traditional hybrid art is sweeping through the fantasy genre, lead by artists like Chris McGrath and John Picacio. Has it been tempting to go digital? I personally believe there is room for both, but I think there is a sort of intangible purity in knowing a piece was completely created with no help from a computer.

Emily: I notice a lot of fantasy novel covers are going in that direction but I agree that there will always be room for both traditional and digital illustrations. Artists like Dan Dos Santos, Donato Giancola and Gregory Manchess work with oils and are among the most highly sought after fantasy and science fiction book cover artists.

Many artists do make the switch to working digitally because it allows more freedom to alter the work at any stage as well as the ability to work more quickly towards a deadline. While I do occasionally work digitally at some of the preliminary stages of my illustration process, the final art is exclusively traditional aside from value and color adjustments made to a scanned piece of art in order to match it to the original. I prefer to do most of my drawings with a pencil in sketchbooks, and my painted work is created with gouache on cold-press watercolor paper. I do have a Wacom tablet that I share with my husband (who is also an artist) and I will use that occasionally to make adjustments to drawings that I’ve scanned in. I’ll use Photoshop to do things like shrink a head that’s too big or alter costume details.

Making revisions to a sketch at the request of an art director is also more convenient digitally, as long as they aren’t too extensive. In that case I usually re-work the drawing on paper. I will also use Photoshop to create color and value studies before moving on to a final illustration. Adopting digital media can increase efficiency, and I admire artists who have been able to adopt digital working methods while retaining the same style they previously worked with traditionally. The main reason I have chosen not to switch to digital is that I haven’t developed a feel for it. Even with the Wacom stylus, using the computer seems counterintuitive to me. I like the feeling of a brush or graphite on paper, and the more intuitive process of mixing paint on a palette. I’ve always had a tough time using the color picker in Photoshop and getting the color I want. Everything looks so saturated! Ending up with an original piece of art that is unique in all the world is a special feeling. It’s also nice because it can be sold to collectors who might prefer to buy original art!

Justin: Your creatures’ facial expressions always give me pause because they hint at something going on in their minds. The minotaur is a good example. He looks rather annoyed at having been painted. Is he just grumpy, or is there a story there? How do you go about deciding on the emotions your creatures display?

Emily: I’m really glad to hear you liked the minotaur! That turned out to be one of my favorite images from the book. While I’d say I didn’t have any particular history in mind for the minotaur aside from the mythological tale, instead of making him look like a brutally cruel beast, I chose to humanize him a bit and make him look angry, but also sad. He’s been imprisoned in the labyrinth because of his frightening appearance, not through any fault of his own.

It’s a great compliment to hear that my characters and creatures have a soul; something going on underneath the surface that can be discerned by the viewer. This might sound a little weird, but ever since I have been drawing characters I’ve felt as though maybe what I’m really doing is unearthing a person or creature that exists in some other place and just bringing them to life here. I imagine some writers might feel the same way. I’ve been drawing since a young age and often invented characters. I try hard to convey a personality or emotion through a drawing. I’m drawn to and influenced by the same quality in other artists’ work. I’m always most affected if I can empathize with a character, even if that character is just a two dimensional drawing or painting and I might not know anything about them beyond what’s presented in the image. That thing beyond the image, that magic being made between the viewer and the image is something special.

When I want to convey the personality of a creature or character I ask myself questions like: what are they doing, why are they doing it, what would they be thinking or how would they be feeling in the situation I’ve imagined? As far as how I draw such an image, when it comes to something like a facial expression on a human or humanoid character I make funny faces in the mirror. For a creature, if I use animal reference for inspiration I might try to inject some of the quality of that animal’s essence into the creature.

Justin: What’s next for you? Any special projects you can share?

Emily: Trying to keep up with my blog! I’m working on a painting demo that complements a bonus online creature-drawing demo for The Explorer’s Guide to Drawing Fantasy Creatures. I’m also continuing my illustration work for publisher Inhabit Media and their Inuit Mythology Initiative.

Sometime in the future I hope to break into more illustration work for the young adult fantasy market.

Justin: Thanks for answering my questions, Emily!
I truly enjoyed The Explorer’s Guide to Drawing Fantasy Creatures, it was a delight to read and learn from. I hope it sells a billion copies. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more from you in the future! Readers, leave a comment for a chance to win a copy of The Explorer’s Guide to Drawing Fantasy Creatures.

Slums of the Shire
by Daniel Polansky

Occasionally you’ll be with a group of people and they’ll get to talking about their favorite historical epochs, nostalgic for lives they never led. One person will talk up their childhood love of the Wild West, another reveal a penchant for Victorian England. This last one just has a thing for corsets, but it’s better not to call them on it.

When my turn rolls round I take a sip of whatever we’re drinking and look at my shoes. “The mid 90′s were pretty good,” I say lamely. “Slower internet and everything, but at least we had penicillin.”

Perhaps it’s my being a history buff, but the past sucked. For about a millennium and a half after the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe just seems like a real shit place to reside. Lots of rooting in filth until you die at thirty a half mile from where you born. Nominally the nobles had it better, but still, your fever would have been treated with the application of leaches and your pretty young bride had like a one in two chance of surviving child birth.

This probably is why I don’t understand fantasy — that is to say that collection of high medieval tropes collected by Tolkien and gleefully reproduced by two generations of descendants.

Take elves for instance — though perfectly capable of imagining a world where higher intelligence evolved in a species separate from humanity, my powers of make believe fail when positing that the relation between said species would be anything beyond unceasing warfare. Even a cursory glance at human history reveals our collective willingness to commit genocide on fellow homo sapiens — how much quicker would we have been to eradicate a separate species competing for identical resources? If elves existed, our ancestors would have hunted them down to extinction and erected a monument to the accomplishment.

But I digress.

Even when nestled comfortably in a quest to kill a dragon or overthrow a dark lord or what have you, strange thoughts plague me. What does the shady side of Gondor look like? How many platinum coins would a dime bag set me back? What is the point of hobbits? They’re just short, fat people. People are plenty fat as it is.

Low Town is sort of my attempt to answer some of those questions (not the last one). It’s the story of the Warden, a former intelligence agent and current drug dealer, whose gradual slide into self-destruction is briefly checked by the discovery of a dead body in the neighborhood he runs. An ill-timed bout of conscience rattles the easy cage of venality he’s built for himself, and leads him on a collision course with the life he’d left behind. The Warden is a guy trying to survive the next few days, and not particularly squeamish as to what that requires — the sort of person more likely to populate a classic crime novel than to be found stocking the fantasy section of your local Borders (RIP).

More broadly, Low Town is an attempt to meld the best aspects of noir with a low fantasy setting — a meeting of tastes which I think complement each other nicely. The spare language and fast pace of good noir offers a pleasant counterpoint to the sprawling — one might even say bloated — length of much modern fantasy. On a somewhat broader level, the tendency of fantasy to focus on world-shaking events often renders it irrelevant to the average reader, whose life relatively rarely devolves into single combat against vaguely satanic analogs. By contrast, noir is concerned with the individual, with greed and lust, sins all of us can comprehend to some degree. Low Town centers on the conceit that a world with magic wouldn’t be altogether different from a world without it. People are still (on the whole) selfish, stupid creatures, focused almost exclusively on the immediate satisfaction of their basic desires, only now some of them can shoot fire out of their hands.

That’s the idea at least. It comes out today (August 16^th) in the US and Canada, and on Thursday (August 18^th) in the UK and Commonwealth. I hope you check it out and see if I’ve succeeded, or if I’m just a pretentious clown. Or both.

Question: Which speculative fiction character created by another author are you kicking yourself for not dreaming up first?

Rachel Aaron: I’m going to have to go with Killashandra from Anne McCaffrey’s Crystal Singer books. The whole series was pretty cheesy 80s sci fantasy (especially the final 2 books), but I LOVED IT, mostly because Killashandra was ambitious, powerful, clever, and completely unapologetic about being so awesome, even when she got herself into major trouble. She was a savvy business lady who got the hot guys by force of personality. Three books wasn’t nearly enough Killa, and if I ran the world, I would grab the series from McCaffrey and run with it.

Jesse Bullington: Most recently, she’s the nameless (as far as my sieve-like brain recalls) narrator from J.M. McDermott’s brilliant trilogy-opener Never Knew Another. McDermott gives her a great, unique voice that perfectly captures both the feel of the world and the intricacies of the character; there’s poetry and brutality in equal measure, but both seem organically hers instead of existing to simply make her McDermott’s mouthpiece. She’s devout in her faith, being a priestess, which makes for an interesting, compromised narration — McDermott’s very grey world and cast of characters are all seen through the black-and-white filter of the true believer. Also, she wears a wolfskin hood, which is worth ten thousand cool points, and is a shapeshifter, which tacks on another ten Gs, at least — I’ve rarely come across such a smartly rendered psychology of a liminal character, sure, but also: wolfskin hood. Yes.

Gail Carriger: Terry Pratchett’s The Luggage. The Luggage doesn’t say much, and he doesn’t appear often, oh but when he does, he always steals the scene and readers know hilarity will ensue. Described as part portmanteau part homicidal maniac, always grumpy, sometimes lovelorn, The Luggage may be the greatest comedy character since Marvin the Paranoid Android. One wonders what would happen if the two ever met.

Seanan McGuire: If I could change the world so I’d created one character created by someone else, it would be the revolutionary Goldilocks from Bill Willingham’s fantastic Fables. Heavily-armed, seriously twisted, and more than a little bit insane… what’s not to love?

L. E. Modesitt, Jr.: Because my characters are so closely tied to my worlds, I can’t say that I’ve ever gotten the feeling that I wished I’d come up with another character first, but I will say that I’m really in awe of the world/characters that Roger Zelazny created in Creatures of Light and Darkness.

Thanks to these authors for sharing their secrets with us! One random commenter gets the Bullington audiobook.

Question: Which speculative fiction writer has had the greatest influence on your own writing style and what, specifically, do you find most inspirational about that writer’s style?

Alex Bell: Definitely Terry Pratchett. His Discworld novels got me through the horror that was secondary school. I loved them for their escapism, warmth and humour and the way they put a smile on my face and made me feel better able to cope with real life!

Erin Bow: Ursula LeGuin. I love many things about her, but as a writer I’m most inspired by the real-ness of her invented worlds. Narnia might well fit in a wardrobe, but Earthsea could fill an ocean and not neglect the whales.

Chris Evans: Tolkien‘s classic fantasy construct showed me the power of myth and complex layering in world building while George MacDonald Fraser gave me insight into the bond between soldiers in time of war. My style is very much a reflection of these two authors’ approaches to grand geo-political concepts on the one hand, and intimate portraits of human (or elf and dwarf) character under extreme duress on the other.

Kevin Hearne: Neal Stephenson taught me that you can write an incredibly brainy book full of ideas and still appeal to a wide audience with deftly written action sequences and a nuclear bomb riding in a sidecar. His spec-fic kung fu still impresses me to this day — and Snow Crash, particularly, is looking eerily prophetic these days.

Matthew Hughes: It’s Jack Vance by a long shot.  I am drawn to his minimalist description, his ironically detached dialogue, and the way he implies humor without reaching for the pig’s bladder.  He is the only author that I knowingly reread.

Mindy Klasky: My writing style has been most influenced by one of my early fantasy idols — Katherine Kurtz, particularly her first six Deryni books.  I devoured those volumes in middle school, reading them so often that I had large portions memorized. Kurtz’s writing often alternates witty, expository dialog with richly-detailed descriptions (particularly of ritual and architecture). Unconsciously, I adapted a similar style for my own books. Except, um, my writing doesn’t often focus on architecture; I tend to describe food :-)

Ken Scholes: Hand’s down, it was Ray Bradbury. His stories started wowing me in the second grade and at 13, I discovered his essay “How to Keep and Feed a Muse” in the textbook On Writing by Writers. I knew after reading it that I had to be a writer. I wrote him soon after and he was kind enough to write back and recommend some books on writing for me, advising me to write 1,000 words a day. I started writing my own stories then and thirty years later, I dedicated my third novel, Antiphon, to him.

Please leave a comment or suggest a question for us to ask in the future.

Bill Capossere: I enjoyed reading THE LAWS OF MAGIC and I’m wondering how the storyline came about?

Michael Pryor: I’d written nearly twenty books by the time I was considering the project that became THE LAWS OF MAGIC. I’d just finished writing a series that was traditional high fantasy — full of castles, knights, battles and so on. I wanted to write a fantasy set in a different historical period and the Edwardian period just before the First World War appealed to me as a time of great political ferment and significant social change. Add a little magic, I thought, and I’d have the perfect setting for some rip-roaring adventures.

Bill: How much of it was plotted in advance?

Michael Pryor: I wrote Blaze of Glory as a standalone adventure, but with an eye on a series. I did plot it out completely, so I knew where it was going to end, but I knew that the setting would support more books. When the chance came to extend into a second book, and then four more, I sat down and planned the overarching series arc, plus the individual adventures that would make up each book.

Bill: The books each resolve a singular problem while the overlying series arcs involving war and Tremaine progress but aren’t resolved. Did you plan on that kind of structure and why?

Michael Pryor: I don’t mind the cliffhanger type of series, but I firmly wanted to write a different sort of series, a novel sequence, if you will. Each book has its own story which is resolved at the end but, as you point out, the overarching narrative involves looming war and the master magician who is doing much to bring this about. I wanted standalone books as I think it lets readers begin midstream much more easily, providing multiple access points for people to join in.

Bill: There are lots of books out there dealing with young people learning magic, lots of alternate history books, steampunk books. What makes THE LAWS OF MAGIC stand out amidst the crowd?

Michael Pryor: The approach to magic in THE LAWS OF MAGIC is different. I wanted magic as a rational, intellectual pursuit, and I use the history of science and the scientific method of inquiry as a parallel. I wanted to stay well away from vague mysticism and instead have magic as something that could yield to careful experimentation, documentation and cerebration. With this, THE LAWS OF MAGIC is different, but I will add that the combination of romance, comedy, fantasy and political thriller has rarely been attempted in an Edwardian historical context …

Bill: In my reviews, I called the books “charmingly old-fashioned” — reminiscent of old-time romance adventures and older YA like Tom Swift or The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew — and said Aubrey was a bit of a mix of a young Sherlock Holmes, Tom Swift, and Hermione Granger. Any comment?

Michael Pryor: Spot on. Part of my writing (and any author’s writing) is a tribute to their influences. The tradition of brave adventures, bold comrades working together, was very much part of my reading as a youngster and I was sorry that the whole notion of heroism was seen as out of date. Young people need heroes — we all need heroes — and to read about young people doing their best to do the right thing in extraordinary circumstances is both entertaining and useful.

Aubrey’s friend George Doyle has a surname that is a deliberate nod to Sherlock Holmes’s creator. I’d always enjoyed Holmes’s adventures, and in preparation for writing THE LAWS OF MAGIC I reread the entire collection of stories. Not just for their cleverness, but for details of setting, language and manners. Invaluable.

Bill: Did anything catch you by surprise as you wrote?

Michael Pryor: What did take me by surprise was the romance. I didn’t plan to write a story with a romantic element, but two characters insisted on liking each other. At first, I prised them apart because such a thing wasn’t in my planning, but everything they did and said pointed toward a developing relationship. In the end, I listened to them instead of sticking blindly to my plan, and I was glad I did.

Bill: One of the things I truly enjoyed about the series was the way you took time to develop Caroline and Aubrey’s relationship, unlike a lot of books and films that throw a pair of strangers together, toss in a stressful situation, and end up with “love.”

Michael Pryor: Part of their cautious attraction is historical. In fact, the way they talk and meet without a chaperone would have been considered almost improper. But this circumspect hesitancy is wonderful to work with, for a writer. The manners and morals of the time allowed me to have misunderstandings, uncertainties, longings and yearnings, quite a bit of pining, all of which are aspects of relationships that are often hastened through in today’s more abrupt world. I felt it added a certain sweetness, and respect, that showed a sign of young relationships that is important.

Very early on, I did know that that it wouldn’t be a relationship that was rushed into. Caroline was far too sensible for that.

Bill: How do you balance story, pace, and historical detail? How obsessive a researcher are you? What percentage would you guess of your research/notes actually makes it into the books?

Michael Pryor: I love my research, and it’s easy to get lost in its seductiveness. I have to control myself, sometimes, and tear myself away from the details of history.

I do remind myself, constantly, that just because I found a really cool bit of history, it doesn’t have to make it into the story. I have read historical novels where the overriding intention of the author seems to be to show us every single thing he or she dug up while researching. The result is that characters and narrative are swamped, dragged down by detail. I aim to use historical detail mostly as incidental, background stuff that adds to the texture and tone, rather than making a big deal of it. At a rough estimate, probably about 20% of my research makes it into a book.

Bill: For various reasons, such as pacing, increased tension and humor, etc., I felt the books improved as they went on with Heart of Gold a bit of a step up and then the series really finding a strong footing in Word of Honour (feel free to disagree with the premise). Did you think the books improved as you went, were there aspects you wanted to work on after Blaze of Glory, or do you want to just thumb your many-times published nose at me and move on to the next question?

Michael Pryor: A fair, and perceptive, comment! Looking back, that’s how I see the books working, too. Blaze was written with some hesitancy – I hadn’t been signed up to write it. It also had to do a lot of work that the other books don’t. For Heart of Gold and onwards, the world had been set up, the scenario put in place, the characters formed and working – all thanks to Blaze. The tone was perhaps less confident in Blaze, too. Aubrey’s whimsical, intelligent diction really takes flight in Heart of Gold.

Bill: You have a concluding book for the series that you’re working on (or finished?). What are your feelings as you bring such a long-running series to an end?

Michael Pryor: It’s sad, coming to the end of a long series. Those characters, the ones I’ve worked with for eight years, are now going on with their lives without me … The final chapter of Hour of Need, the final book of the series, was immensely difficult to write. As well as the usual pressure to write a satisfying, complete conclusion, I had the overwhelming need to write an ending that would be right for Aubrey, Caroline and George. They deserved it.

Bill: And now that it’s over, if you could ask two of the characters from THE LAWS OF MAGIC one question each, what would the question (s) be and whom would you ask them of?

Michael Pryor: I’d ask Aubrey how he prefers to tie his tie — full Windsor knot or the four-in-hand knot.

I’d ask Caroline about the best way to disable an armed attacker while not having a hair fall out of place.

Bill: A lot of YA minimizes the adult presence. Sometimes it just ignores them, sometimes it kills them off, sometimes it makes the adults simply too insignificant or too dumb/oblivious to matter. The parents of your main character as well as Caroline’s parents are highly important figures and clearly smart in their own right — a Prime Minister, a naturalist, an artist — and while they play relatively small roles in terms of page count, their actions are significant to the plot. How did you envision the adult role in a series centered on young adult characters?

Michael Pryor: I was determined to avoid the missing parent syndrome that is, as you point out, rife in YA books. For all the lip service to writing ‘realistic’ fiction, so many of these books have no adults, which simply isn’t realistic as all. To this end, I wanted a story where the main characters not only like their parents (shock!) but the parents do appear in the stories and have roles of their own. And not just as wise Obi-Wan counselors, but with lives of their own, ambitions and desires of their own. This was a very important aim for the series.

Bill: Another aspect I really liked was how magic isn’t simply based on in-born talent. Aubrey is not a great magician because he’s got lots of “talent,” but because he studies it constantly; he’s always thinking about it, always looking for connections and cross-applications, always learning, even from the villain of the series. I also liked the use of Laws and languages and the way it works almost like math, with equations and substitutions, an interior logic, and the like. How did you approach the magic? Did you have it fully in your mind or fine-tune it as you went along?

Michael Pryor: When approaching a new Fantasy book (or series) the question of magic is one of the foremost in my mind. How’s it going to work? What are its limitations? How can I make it different and refreshing? I’ve always been interested in Science — the history and philosophy of science and the scientific method. I’ve also been concerned at the contemporary trend to decry, suspect or condemn science, mostly through lack of understanding of what science is. Part of my aim in THE LAWS OF MAGIC was to address this. Like mathematical ability, some people in this world do have innate talent — but this isn’t enough. Hard work, training, and study are needed to make the most of it.

The general idea of the magical system was well worked out before I began. Spells would be like mathematical formulae. They could be worked out by careful experimentation and observation. The actual number of spells and their effects, however, did grow as the series went along…

Bill: What would you say distinguishes YA literature, if anything?  As a follow-up, what distinguishes good YA from bad YA?  I won’t ask you to name bad YA writers or books, but could you tell us a few you’d recommend?

Michael Pryor: Some YA literature is easily distinguished, but some isn’t. I have many adult readers for THE LAWS OF MAGIC — it has crossover appeal. Some people say it’s the age of the main characters, but I think it’s more than that. I like to believe that YA literature pays more attention to narrative than some adult, literary fiction. Story still matters to Young Adults.

Distinguishing between good and bad YA, to me, is the same as distinguishing between good and bad books in any sphere. Firstly, the story must engage. There’s a million ways to do this, and a million ways to write something that fails this first test. Character is vital. Interesting, well rounded, believable characters are important, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be outrageous, outlandish or extraordinary. A real narrative is crucial, too. If nothing happens, you don’t have a story. You might have a lovely piece of writing, but you don’t have a story.

I’d recommend any of Garth’s Nix’s books, but especially Sabriel and its companion volumes. Alison Goodman’s Eon is a ripper, and I’ll give a plug to fellow steampunker Richard Harland with his Worldshaker.

Bill: Can you recall for us one or two of those magical moments of response to a particular scene in a book or two — those sort of “shiver moments” that make one fall in love with the magic of reading all over again

Michael Pryor: I still remember reading THE LORD OF THE RINGS for the first time. I had many, many moments of pure stupefaction, but in particular I remember the tension and the terror when Frodo and his friends were fleeing Hobbiton, trying to get to Bree, chased by the Black Riders. Brrr.

Sometimes when I read, I simply cheer out loud at particularly rousing points of the story or when I’m mightily impressed with the writer’s craft. The last time I did this was recently, when I re-read Neal Stephenson’s BAROQUE trilogy. What a writer.

Bill: What sort of projects do you have in hand or in mind in the near future?

Michael Pryor: I’m working on a new historical fantasy set in London in 1908 — the year of the first London Olympics.

Bill: I will look forward to that! Thanks for joining us!

Readers, we’ll give away a book from our stacks to one commenter.

Justin Blazier: Thanks for taking time out to answer some questions for me. Your writing ranges across several genres. You’ve had successes in Horror, Detective, Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi and Fantasy. The Brooklyn Knight series seems to provide a home for all your varied writing interests. Was that the plan?

CJ Henderson: No, not at all. First off, it couldn’t have been because, well… I don’t actually ever have a plan. I make things up as I go along. All I knew when I started was that the character’s name was Piers Knight, and that he was a curator at the Brooklyn Museum, because I had worked that much out with the editor. I also had a fairly good handle on the character of the intern because I had decided to model her after a friend of my daughter’s I thought would be perfect for the part (ironically, I discovered after I made that decision that her friend had just been awarded an internship at the Brooklyn Museum for that summer, so I guess she was even more perfect for the part than I thought).

I knew it would have horror and mystery, because that was fairly well implied in what the editor and I had discussed. But everything else just worked its way in as I went along.

Justin: So, if you make things up as you go along, where did the original idea for The Brooklyn Knight come from?

CJ: In a nutshell, it was the idea of the original editor, the late Brian Thompson. He loved matching people to projects, and he was really good at it. He was a Brooklyn boy like myself, and he loved the Brooklyn Museum. He pitched the idea to me to have a curator at the museum get into some kind of urban fantasy mischief. He was an enormous fan of my Teddy London supernatural detective series, knew the work I had done for the Lovecraft estate with their character Inspector Legrasse, and the Zarnak stories I had done for the Lin Carter estate. He also knew I was getting a little bored with doing so many action adventure horror novels and shorts centering around hard-boiled detective types.

He realized (even if I didn’t) that I needed to shift gears. He also knew I was getting into a lot of lighter stuff, and so he put together an idea he thought might be perfect for me. He was right, of course. I took to the idea of Knight immediately. The first novel simply flew out of me. I knew so much about the character before the first chapter was finished, it amazed me. In fact, I still know tons more than the audience does.

Justin: I liked Prof. Piers Knight’s character quite a bit. He was simultaneously both frustratingly aloof and charming to those around him. I compared him to Indiana Jones in my review, but I don’t think the two characters would get along if left alone together. In your opinion what sets the professor apart from his relic-hunting peers we see in other works?

CJ: Wow… you know what I just said about knowing things the audience doesn’t? Well, I have to be a rummy here and dodge this question. You were sharp enough to notice that Knight is a bit different. That he acts just a bit out of step with others. For once (haha) that’s not bad writing on my part. No, he is different. He does have a secret. And just as there were clues ladled into the first novel, there are more in the second. The secret (first part, anyway) won’t come out until the third.

And yes, Piers would see Jones as an opportunist, as a user of people. Jones succeeded so brilliantly because of his amoral nature. It was great writing. Piers has no problem with making hard choices, but he would have blown up the Ark rather than let it fall into the hands of the Nazis. Indiana Jones is a little boy who has to have what he wants when he wants it. That’s what makes him adorable and why women love him and want to reform him, and why they forgive him when he acts badly. Women are hardwired to forgive children when they act stupid and self-centered. If they weren’t, none of us would survive childhood. But Piers is an adult. He is his own man. There will be no molding of the professor by outside forces any time soon. Adults can’t be forgiven by others. They have to accept responsibility for their actions.

Man, I talk a lot, don’t I? If I don’t curb myself, we’ll be here all day. Next question.

Justin: You dabble in the humor business a bit and you’ve even written some humorous fiction. Brooklyn Knight had its fair share of funny moments. How important is it for you to make your readers laugh from time to time, even though the overall tone of the novel is fairly serious?

CJ: I wouldn’t say it’s important to me. It’s more that humor just comes to us in real life all the time. Sometimes we see it and sometimes we don’t. Two of my absolute favorite horror movies are Ghostbusters and Tremors. Both of these movies are filled with humor, but one of them is thought of as a comedy and the other as a horror movie. I really do believe it’s only the presence of so many comedians in Ghostbusters that made them promote it as a comedy. The storyline itself is straight horror… and Lovecraftian horror at that.

For instance, none of the Knight short stories have that much humor. I think it’s because novels give me more time to relax and get into character situations, where the shorts have to be story-driven, straight forward, zoom-o kind of things. I love writing humor, my three most recent short story series have all been mostly comedy-driven. But to stop straying all over the place from the question, no, I don’t plan comedy in my novels, look for places to stick it in, or fret if it doesn’t happen. I just let things flow.

Justin: Where has all the comedy in speculative fiction gone to? I like to read and write humor and often wonder why I don’t see more of it on the shelves in the SFF genres. With the success of legends such as Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, you’d think we’d see more.

CJ: I don’t know what to say. I love comedy, as I just said. But, it also took me twenty years of being published before I chanced writing any. I think it takes a great deal of skill to turn out decent comedy. I find myself holding my breath anytime I send one out, waiting to see what the editors say back to me. The problem with comedy is that so much of what is passed off as humor is topical — transitory. Funny today, maybe even tomorrow, but next month? Who knows?

I do stories now about two sailors, Rocky and Noodles, which are sci-fi military musical comedies. Monty Python meets Abbott and Costello kind of stuff. There are a lot of Star Trek references which, if people catch them, will be funny, but I don’t rely on those for the humor, because yes, old farts like me think the sun rises and sets with Classic Trek, but the younger audience, who knows? And, nothing turns off an audience faster than an entertainer so in love with something they find fault with their audience for not getting how “clever” they are.

The Challenge of the Unknown series centers around a network news show dedicated to info only on UFOs, haunted houses, witches, werewolves, et cetera. The idea came to me thinking of the old ABC show Sightings, which ran for two years I believe, actually only covering such news. I always wondered, what would happen if these people went into one of these haunted houses and peoples’ heads started spinning, and stories started pouring out. These are much in the Ghostbusters vein, with the humor coming from the absurdity of the situation, and horror based more on the hideous things Hollywood types do to each other rather than buckets of meat and blood being thrown against the wall.

I guess the answer is, humor is tough. Even out of the two examples you gave, I never got into Pratchett, but I chased down every scrap of Douglas Adams. Yeah, humor is subjective, and scary. You have to have iron pants to submit humor.

Justin: The new book, Central Park Knight is releasing today. How was the writing of book two? I know, for some authors, book one is sort of a feeling-out process, and book two can be easier or more difficult depending on how you felt about book one.

CJ: Book two was a lot harder. Since the clues being hidden were closer to the surface, since essentially the second book is the second act as far as the big reveal is concerned, they took a lot of effort to conceal. I hate authors who write books which don’t end, basically telling the reader, “hey, you want more, you want answers, wait for ‘em, or go away. I don’t care enough about you to bother.”

Think back to the original Star Wars. Now, sure, that story doesn’t end. When the first movie is over, the rebels are still in terrible trouble. But, we’re given enough of an ending that we’re all happy. As the old-timers (like myself) in your audience will remember, there was no talk of a sequel. We all thought that what we had seen was all there was going to be.

Well, that’s the way I write my novels and even my short stories. The ending is the ending. Period. I always want whatever I deliver to the public to feel like that’s all they’re getting, and for it to be a satisfactory meal. So, yeah, this one was harder because to achieve that sense of completeness, I had to work a lot harder.

Also, on a more mundane level, the idea of the series is that Piers will have a different intern in each book. Intern is by its definition a transitory position. And, I didn’t just want to bring in a clone of the first intern. Even if the public loved her, it was a cheat. Why bother changing characters if there’s no real change? So, to give myself a challenge, I brought in someone completely different. Different on every level, just to make myself work harder.

And, while I was at it, I thought, why not do that on all levels? You see, another thing that irks me about some series writing is the way the characters do the same things every time. It’s like a female character on a TV show who always wears boots, jeans and a tank top. Does she own no skirts? No suits? No gowns? No sneakers? Anyway, where a lot of writers would have Piers search the museum for mystical weapons suited for the new menace and then dispatch it, I didn’t want things to be that easy. So, as soon as he assembled the weapons in the second book, I pull the rug out from under him so that we can see if he has any worth as a thinker, as a man.

Yeah, I set myself a number of challenges in the second book, and I probably made my editor (the incredibly patient and insightful Kristen Sevick) wonder if the merchant marine might not be a more rewarding career, but I had a good time and was happy with what I accomplished. Now I’m just waiting for the world to return the report card.

Justin: How many more of the Knight series can we expect? The Professor has the potential to carry a long-term series. His talents and interests lend themselves to some great stories.

CJ: How many we can expect is up to Tor, of course. Hopefully sales will justify their continued faith in the series. I know the third book inside and out. In fact, if folks go to my website, posted right now are the stories “An Excess of Joy,” which is the first few chapters of Central Park Knight, and “Pragmatic,” which I know, and well, I guess now everyone else knows, is what I plan to make the first few chapters of the third novel.

Like I said, there’s going to be a big reveal in the third book (and no, you can’t figure it out by reading “Pragmatic”), but it’s a reveal for the audience only. In the fourth book, I want that reveal to be made to the world at large. The fifth would be Piers dealing with the world having found out his secret. Then, in the sixth, there would be a reveal to Piers about his secret. And then… well… after that trying to tell you what I know without giving anything more away gets impossible. So, let me say that I see the possibility of a lot of books myself.

Now, I only know the actual menace and some of the plot for the third. I know nothing of the stories of the others, just the big moments. Whether it’s vampires, werewolves, bad-ass fairies, killer clowns, I don’t know. Knowing that the menace in the third book is another massive one, I’d like to calm things down in the fourth. Of course, I thought I was going to do that in the second, and well… that didn’t work out, did it?

Justin: Which authors have had the biggest influences on you creatively?

CJ: Wow, well… in no particular order, just as they pop into my pea-sized brain… ah… Stan Lee, Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clifford D. Simak, Jack Vance, Rex Stout, Douglas Adams, Alfred Bester, John Brunner… I could probably go on, but how many people can be the “biggest?” Better stop before I water down the honor too far.

Justin: Where/when did you get your start writing? Has it always been something you’ve wanted to do?

CJ: My earliest memories are of telling stories to the other kids under the street light at night. I have always been a storyteller, and I always will be. The fact that I was able to get my work into print and make my living from writing has been a terrific blessing, but I would have been doing it no matter what. Yeah, it’s what I always wanted to do.

Justin: I read your bio on your website. You point out a fact that most readers don’t realize — that more than likely their favorite author has a day job *gasp*. Your list of past jobs is quite extensive. One on the list was “Lounge Lizard.” What exactly is a lounge lizard, and how exactly does one become said lizard of the lounge?

CJ: It’s just an old term for someone who sings in a lounge. It’s meant to convey a sense of not the Frank Sinatras and Tony Bennetts, but the guys who are only cheap knock-offs of them. For every Lady GaGa there are ten thousand really sad and awful imitators. Now, hopefully I wasn’t that bad, but I did get into a suit and sing in bars for very little money, knocking out stuff like “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” for people who were just trying to drink and not be seen by anyone who knew them while they tried to hook up with people who were not their spouses. Oh, my sad, sad past.

Justin: Looking back over the years of your writing career and comparing that to what new authors go through now, do you think things are better or worse for aspiring authors?

CJ: Yes. Not being a wise-guy, it’s easy to talk about how much harder things were back when, or how hard they are now, depending on how one wants to be viewed by those to whom they’re speaking. But, for new authors, things are as they are. They don’t know what it’s like to have print magazines in every drug store that people actually bought and read, but on the other hand, they don’t have the fear and mistrust of the internet that a lot of older writers have in the back of their minds. They accept the world for what it is, because that’s what it is.

Having had to walk uphill ten miles every day to sell a story when I was young, having grown up in an era when self-publishing was a dirty word, it’s easy to look around and talk about the vast opportunities that folks have today. But, it’s always goddamned hard for people to break into any aspect of training. Look at all the American Idol-like shows. That fierce competition, the fear, the panic and hope and desperate desire, that’s all of us. Dancers, singers, sculptors, photographers, comics, writers — all of us — we all want to make it, get the checks, hear the applauds, feel the love, and we all have to go up against a world full of others who want the same things.

There is always a terribly small and finite amount of reward to spread around amongst the hordes of hopefuls who desire to be recognized for their talent. People write for a lot of different reasons, and they don’t usually know what it is they’re trying to do, or why they’re doing it. They just know they have to do it. And it hurts to be rejected just as much now as it always has. Being told you’re no good, that you need to improve, that you’re services are not required at this time, whatever, hurts just as much now as it always has.

And yeah, I know this isn’t exactly what you asked, but it’s the best I’ve got. Yes, I’ve written some 70 books/novels, had hundreds and hundreds of short stories and comics published, thousands of non-fiction pieces printed, and I’m still scrambling after the next sale. There are a handful of writers who can churn out anything and have it end up in print without worry. For the rest of us, it’s a scary, numbing, humiliating crapbag of a job, with one of the sweetest rewards any human being has ever received, one of the most golden rings ever snagged.

It’s always been hard, and it’s always going to be hard. If it wasn’t, everyone would do it. And then getting published wouldn’t mean anything. And in a way, getting published doesn’t really mean anything. People with no talent get published all the time. People whose work will not last even unto their own demise get read by millions.

What’s hard is getting published, and getting read, and then getting reread. What’s hard is writing something that will affect the way people think and live their lives. That will touch their souls. That will make them cry. That will make them a better person. That will make them remember you in their prayers.

That’s what’s always going to be hard. And it should be.

Justin: I always like to ask authors their opinion on the state of the industry. Some are a bit nervous as things move quickly into unknown territory, with the internet and electronics changing the landscape almost daily. Where do you see SFF publishing in the near future. Is it really all doom and gloom? Or are we on the brink of a renaissance of sorts? Maybe something else entirely?

CJ: You’re talking to a guy who’s getting away with writing scifi military musical comedies. Science fiction is in a recession right now because science itself is in a renaissance. Every day, something’s being cloned, or a new app is changing everyone’s perceptions, or a new element is being identified, a new origin for the universe is being uncovered … I mean … I just saw something yesterday on the fact that cars can now parallel park themselves. Are you kidding me? Really? Crap!

Also, genres take turns. A marketplace gets saturated and has to fall to rise again. Fantasy is pretty big right now. Steam-punk is growing, but in both fantasy and sci-fi directions.

I’m not nervous, but I write everything. I miss writing hard-boiled detective stuff, but the market isn’t there. Also, I’m not as angry and crazed as I was thirty years ago when I was knocking those stories out all over the place. Now, I want to laugh, and to make other people laugh, so I do a lot more comedy. I also want to give people hope, and to try and get them to believe in themselves and their ability to accomplish things. That’s a big part of whatever I write, no matter what genre I fold it into.

So, for the SFF marketplace in the near future, all I can say is, it will be doom and gloom for those who don’t give the public what they want, and butterscotch and sunshine for those who do.

Now, of course, figuring out what people want … and when they’re going to want it … well, wow … talk about asking for the philosopher’s stone …

I really enjoyed chatting with C.J. Henderson and will look forward to hunting him down at a local convention this summer. Central Park Knight released today, so be sure to check it out. If you comment below, we’ll enter you into a drawing to win a copy (winners will be announced in the comments, so check the box to subscribe to the comments). You can also find more of C.J.’s work on his website. His site is full of samples and short stories. Personally, I enjoyed the Rocky and Noodles story quite a bit.