There were some small presses that had expressed in the past a general philosophical interest in this -- nothing ever concrete and I never actually pitched anything; it was, you know, "what if" bar talk. And I started thinking that maybe this would be something that a larger publisher might be interested in. A number of people suggested to me that I look into academic presses, since these are literary figures that I've been interviewing and might have some basis in academia; some value or worth, if I want to get pretentious, for future. I started looking around, and much to my non-surprise, most of the academic presses that I contacted reacted with something not quite akin to revulsion and horror that anyone would even consider approaching them with something as crass and base as genre writers. I found a few academic or university presses that had done science fiction. They rejected me on the basis that their science fiction wasn't really science fiction, it was Eastern European writers, or such. Some of Zoran Zivkovic's publishers -- academic publishers -- said, "Oh, no, no. This is Eastern European speculation, and it's beyond the Iron Curtain. This is what we do. This is socially redeeming. The fact that they write something that could be, you know, vaguely considered speculative is...is...well, we don't talk about that." And so I garnered a few rejections.

Then somehow I stumbled across the University of Nebraska, and their Bison book imprint, which gave me pause: how did I miss this, because they're such a prominent university press to begin with, and then their Bison Books Frontiers of Imagination Series is a very prominent reprint series of these classic turn-of-the-century science fiction publishers. I've since found out that Wesleyan also has a very well-respected science fiction line, which might actually have been a better fit, since they do more original as opposed to reprint presentations of their books.

I wrote up a brief pitch, it wasn't a formal pitch, it was just an email to their acquisitions editor saying, "This is my idea, are you even interested? Should I waste my time giving you a formal pitch?" I sent it off to them, and about a week later the editor-in-chief writes me back and says, "Yes, send it. This sounds great." We're off to the races.

But when you're dealing with academic presses and universities and stuff, they have their in-house divisions, and, for one reason or another, they are almost forced by the laws of economics to stay in-house, and since I didn't have anything more concrete than just "talk to someone else about it," they went in-house. I couldn't even come up with a decent title for my book. Usually when I write fiction, I start with the title; a title sort of suggests itself to me and then I kind of hang on to it until a story comes up and say, "Oooo! These two go together." With the interview collection, I started out with the collection and was grasping for titles. 'Cause Nebraska wanted to know what we're going to call this thing, out of desperation I said, "Okay, let's call it Cosmosis." Because that was vague enough not to be, you know...

Essentially, that's what it was. You have to go back to when I started doing interviews. I have a journalism background, and I had managed to publish a handful of short stories at the time early in my career. [The 1997] Worldcon was coming up in San Antonio, and I was trying to figure out some way to keep my momentum going, to keep my name out there in front of the readers and editors and such, and here we have this intense concentration of all these really famous science fiction and fantasy writers coming together in my backyard.

I wrote to Interzone, in which I had published several short fiction pieces at and asked the editor at the time, David Pringle, "Would you be interested in any interviews, since Interzone runs regular interview features?" And he said, "Yeah, sure."

About a month in advance or so, I emailed a couple of the writers. Well, actually, probably more than a couple, about half a dozen and said, "Would you like to get together over the five-day period sometime and, you know, chat a little bit." Jack Williamson was one, Harlan Ellison was one, Elizabeth Moon, JV Jones, and they were all very agreeable to it. Incidentally, Harlan Ellison ended up not going to that Worldcon because of a conflict that had arisen, but he called me on the phone. People tell stories about infamous phone calls from Harlan Ellison out of the blue and they'd be terror stricken and I was, too... "it's like, "My God! What did I do?" He said, "Tell you what. You take a week to come up with questions that I haven't been asked a hundred times before and then we'll do your interview." I did not intend to make Harlan Ellison my first interview I ever did in this kind of format, but he kind of fell into my lap and, who am I to refuse an opportunity like that?

First of all I just try and find the author's web site. If they don't have an author's web then, just any fan sites or anything up there, just the basic biography first, who they are, what their influences [are], if they grew up here, or they grew up there; that's just background information to give you kind of a picture of the person. Their bibliography: find out what books they've written, what their newest books are, what their most recent stuff is, what they're most known for. If they're known for winning Hugos back to back to back, well then that's a significant part of the story. That's background information to give you a feel for the author and a foundation to base everything else on, but what I've found is the most important thing to do is to track down as many prior interviews as possible, not to steal the question, but just so you know what questions are always asked, then just do one step and DON'T ASK THOSE.

That's the main thing that I learned: don't ask these questions, don't ask this question, don't ask this question because everyone else has. Now, I say that, but that's not always really possible or advisable, as far as not asking questions. Because when I interviewed Vernor Vinge, I started off the interview with an apology, I'm sorry that I'm going to start this off, because you've answered it a million times, but let's talk about the Singularity, this concept that you have. He laughed, and then we went on from there. I didn't limit myself to that, which I've seen some interviews with him that that's all they discuss is the concept of the Singularity where humanity reaches a cusp and what comes out the other side of that no longer resembles humanity as we know it.

In Neil Gaiman's 1997 interview in Interzone, which, coincidentally was my first fiction publication in the same book, so I have that one and refer to it often. But in there he discusses that he is leaving comics, that he has accomplished everything that he set out to do with comics, and the challenge is no longer there, so he's going to try other mediums and such, and one of the things that I was able to do when I interviewed Gaiman a half a dozen years later is say, "Okay, you said this back then, but you've got these comics in the pipeline now that are coming out. How do you feel about that?" He was great. He didn't feel the question was an ambush or anything like that, he said, "Yeah, I said that, and at the time, that was the way I felt. I've been away from comics for a very long time and I'm starting to see things and challenges that didn't exist then, that well, if I try this with this kind of storytelling technique, will that work?" The medium had changed; the landscape had changed and he had changed as a writer, so that was a very interesting question and I think his follow-up answer to that was illuminating as far as who he is as a writer and those writing concepts.

You're not really there to inject yourself beyond the questions that you pose; you're just a conduit for the interview subject to express their thoughts and opinions as clearly and as unaffected as possible. So I keep notes and that helps me when I'm doing the editing, because I also number every so often so I have that as kind of a little road map so it's okay, at track number 123, there was this discussion, so I'm able to skip there if there's something relevant and it helps me stay a little better organized.

From "Where do you get your ideas," I've seen that in formal interviews before, which sends many writers' skins crawling, a lot of, "Well, how much did you pay to get your book published?" which opens a whole other can of worms. I admit that I haven't always read the authors that I interview, but I take that as a sign that I have to do additional research, find out more, read up on the person's book or something like that so you can ask questions about their work that are intelligent, because it's your obligation to give them good questions that they can answer. Not necessarily easy questions, but good questions, and some interviewers don't. Some interviewers are fantastic. I could never hope to get the insightful and in-depth conversations going that some of these other people do, but...