I'm a writer; as soon as I imagine what would happen if I found the fountain of youth, it turns into a dystopia in my head.
Marie Brennan
I'd love to see more novels and short stories where the characters have their own folklore that isn't the Plot-Bearing Prophecy of Doom.
At one point in the 'Onyx Court' series, I think during 'In Ashes Lie', I suggested that Lune might come to love someone else eventually. Which was me pushing back against the narrative trope that people only get one True Love in their entire lives - an idea I think is kind of pernicious - but in retrospect, I wish I hadn't done it there.
The truth is that real history was a lot more complicated than our popular understandings lead us to believe.
I honestly think anthropology is one of the most useful fields a fantasy writer can study, more so even than history.
I'm the sort of person who, once I put dragons into the real world, feels obliged to think about how their presence would have changed history.
Given what I do to my characters, I'm not sure I'd want to meet any of them.
When I'm working on a novel, I generally do write every day, but in between those marathons, I take breaks. My brain needs time to recharge.
I think if you write for long enough, you eventually have a problem with everything, because you start figuring out where you could be doing better. But as far back as I can trace, I always wrote clear, grammatical prose.
I read a lot of the 'Pern books' growing up - basically up through 'All the Weyrs of Pern,' maybe a couple after that. As far as formative dragon influences are concerned, she's probably one of the top ones; I know I read other fantasy novels that had them, but none particularly stick in mind.
I've only written two novels, neither of them published, where the book is dominated by a male point of view; in the 'Onyx Court' series, it's split roughly 50/50.
I chose my pen name when I was ten, because I knew even then that my legal name would be more trouble than it was worth.
There was a brief period of time when I was very young where I thought I wanted to be a veterinarian - largely because I liked cats - but then somebody told me I would have to cut animals open, and that was the end of that.
My mood depends heavily on what happens to me right after I get up.
I didn't really distinguish between genre and not-genre as a kid, until I made the transition to adult fantasy via Terry Brooks.
'Fire and Hemlock' is the reason I'm a writer.
