- Where do you get your ideas?
- From here.
- Where did you get the idea for Illumination?
- This time I can give a serious answer. :) The
first piece I was assigned to read when I graduated to Query Proofreader
at The New Yorker was an article about an antiquarian book
dealer and expert—the kind of guy, for example, who's qualified
to assess the value of illuminated manuscripts put up for auction
at Sotheby's. He mentioned a cool discovery: that we can deduce the
existence of traveling manuscript illuminators in the Middle Ages
from the fact that a signature mark appeared on manuscripts originating
from diverse geographical areas. I thought, Hmm, that would be neat—a
fantasy story about a traveling manuscript illuminator. Later on,
after I'd developed the idea of triads, I was looking up some other
word in the dictionary while I was copyediting something, and my eye
fell on the word "ennead." Hmm, I thought... It goes on
pretty much like that.
- Did you base any of your
characters on real people?
- Not a single one. I did, however, name the Meri
Isles and the Isle of Senana after two friends, and I Tuckerized
in an anagrammatic way for geographical names. Tuckerization is where
you name characters after people you know (always with their permission).
What I did was use frequent chatroom typos of my friends' names for
rivers, bays, mountains, and so on. And one chatroom weirdness made
it in as a character name (Jimor).
- You're a copyeditor—who
copyedits your books?
- Robert Stauffer and Rebecca Maines, both careful
and experienced copyeditors, did the work on Illumination and
The Binder's Road, respectively. Copyeditors
are crucial—they're objective readers trained to pay close attention
to logic and grammar and logistics and watch for the approximately
nine gazillion kinds of inconsistency even the most painstaking author
can perpetrate. My proofreaders caught important stuff, too. I can't
thank them enough for the great job they did. Copyeditors do
need copyeditors when they put on their author hats.
- In Illumination,
Liath comes to the conclusion that there must be three powers—magecraft,
and two more to complement it—since everything powerful comes
in threes. Will we find out what they are in the next book?
- Yes.
- How long does it take you
to write a book?
- About a year—but it depends on the book,
and it depends on what you mean by "write." It took six
years to complete Illumination, from when I first drafted the
book, including writing a complete manuscript, throwing it away, and
starting again from scratch. It took about a year from when I started
over...but more of that time was spent reading for the book, or thinking
about the book, or brainstorming, or revising what I'd written than
was spent actually typing words into a file. The Binder's Road
took me six months of reading and thinking, brainstorming and writing
fragments, and then six months of increasingly intensive production
of narrative; in the three months before I delivered it, I frequently
worked twenty-hour days, both writing and revising.
- Did you get an agent first,
or submit your first novel directly to publishers?
- I got an agent first. As more and more publishers
express a preference for agented submissions, it becomes increasingly
advisable to go this route. Many writers submit their books themselves
and contract with an agent only when they've gotten an offer, and
some writers act as their own agents, but in my opinion the former
takes too long and the latter is risky unless you're well versed in
contract law and negotiation. My agent is a godsend.
- When will the next book be
out?
- Triad has just come out in paperback as of
this update (April 2007). The next book in the Illumination Series
doesn't have a publication date yet. I'll be making the announcement on
the
message board before I make it anywhere else, and sneak peeks of upcoming work
and discussions of what I'm working on now are always available there.
- Is The Binder's Road
a sequel to Illumination?
- Yes and no. It's very different in structure
and focus from the first book. Eiden Myr is a complex place, and The
Binder's Road is a different perspective on it. You can read The
Binder's Road without having read Illumination. Triad,
on the other hand, will work best if you've read both previous books,
although the order you read them in doesn't matter. I envision them
as a triangle, with Illumination and The Binder's Road
at the base and Triad at the apex.
- Where is Liath in The
Binder's Road? Will we see her again?
- Good question, and yes. Liath, the main point-of-view
character in and hero of Illumination, isn't even mentioned
by name in The Binder's Road, although she is alluded to in
a couple of places. That was quite deliberate on my part. The Binder's
Road explores a new light, and new characters, and some characters
who were only supporting players in Illumination. For those
people, Liath and her story are a memory—even a legend at this
point—and their own problems are what concern them. I knew that
that would challenge readers, and I believed that they would be up
to the challenge. (My belief has been gratifyingly borne out!) At
the end of Illumination, we see Liath preparing for a sea voyage.
During The Binder's Road, what came of that voyage is up to
the reader's imagination! Patience is rewarded, however. We do see
Liath again in Triad. In fact, we see a lot of Liath,
and with some very surprising twists.
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