There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book.
Terri Windling
We've always lived in dark times. There has always been a range of human experience from the sublime to the brutal, and stories reflect it. It's no less brutal now; each age has its horrors.
Filmmaking can be a fine art.
When I was younger, I was in love with everything about the British Isles, from British folklore to Celtic music. That was always where my passions were as a young girl, and so I studied folklore as a college student in England and Ireland.
Magic Realism is not new. The label's new, the specific Latin American form of it is new, its modern popularity is new, but it's been around as long as literature has been around.
There's that old adage about how there's only seven plots in the world and Shakespeare's done them all before.
I'd had no particular interest in the Southwest at all as a young girl, and I was completely surprised that the desert stole my heart to the extent it did.
I was a great fan of Jim Henson.
I'm also looking for gems that the average reader might have missed.
I like Celtic folk music, Native American music, and any kind of early music. There isn't a lot of music that I don't like... except for Show Tunes.
Since fantasy isn't about technology, the accelleration has no impact at all. But it's changed the lives of fantasy writers and editors. I get to live in England and work for a New York publisher!
I wanted to be a scientist. But I had no math skills.
Read the folklore masters. Go to galleries. Walk in the woods. That's what you need to be an artist or storyteller.
There have been a number of us working very, very hard to bring myth and fairy tales into public consciousness, through fantasy literature and other media. I hope we're succeeding in some small way.
In more recent years, I've become more and more fascinated with the indigenous folklore of this land, Native American folklore, and also Hispanic folklore now that I live in the Southwest.
I divide my time between homes in Arizona and England, six months a year in each place.
My book collection is primarily in America, since that's where I've lived most of my life.
I've only been living in England for the last 10 years, if you don't count my student years.
What I find interesting about folklore is the dialogue it gives us with storytellers from centuries past.
When I started in the business, there was a thing called adult fantasy, but nobody quite knew what it was, and most publishers didn't have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists, which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into.
Robert Jordan, whether he's writing with passion or not, I don't know.
One of the best things about folklore and fairy tales is that the best fantasy is what you find right around the corner, in this world. That's where the old stuff came from.
The first job I was offered was as an editorial assistant. I think it was the best thing for me, in terms of being a storyteller by nature, to have spent years being an editor because I learned so much from it.
A good novel editor is invisible.
But for me, really, the written word is always stronger than film.
I'm an artist, I'm not an academic folklorist.
I have a great respect for the academics who are working with the source material. My hat's off to them.
I'm working on a very long series of paintings based on desert folklore.
I'd like to encourage people to please keep reading-and most importantly, to please keep trying new writers. The only way we can bring fresh new material into the field is if people go out and buy it.
