Only in the fact that I was kind of a science wonk in the '50s. You know, won a lot of science...
When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.
When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.
Were I to decide that I didn't want to be a genre writer, or that I wanted to switch genres, I'd be looking at starting over.
We've had a few inquiries from companies and individuals looking to develop an interactive, web-based game but, to date, none of them have progressed to the contract and license stage.
To feel free enough to write at all, I have to give my research a twist that allows me to say, Okay, this is NOT 12th century France.
Thieves' World is otherwise known as the project that ate my life in the '80s.
There's a lot of hearsay and worse out on the Internet and, though I write fiction, I like to think that my background information is solid.
There is nothing that compares to an unexpected round of applause.
The money can be decent, but I really don't recommend the work-for-hire route as an entry into publishing. Too many things can go wrong.
The books I've written for gaming companies are a like games of miniature golf where the object is to weave an interesting story through an obstacle course.
The actual process of selling my first novel was exciting at the time. I was no longer an apprentice but had become a journeyman.
That bedrock faith that I could write was what blinded me to attempts to discourage me.
Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.
Persistence pays and so does a willingness to follow directions.
Our little writer's colony existed for about three years and it would take nearly that long to share the stories we accumulated.
One of my great passions is the collection of historical trivia.
Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy.
Nothing is too obscure for my interest. You just never know when some quirk of science or history is going to prove useful.
No one uses a ribbon typewriter any more, but your final draft is not the time to try to wring a few more sheets out of your inkjet cartridge.