A Conversation With Ben Jeapes
An interview with David Mathew
On what he hopes Big Engine will achieve:
"I felt it shouldn't be too difficult for a low-overheads publisher with modest
print runs to make a go of it. I explain this carefully to my authors: I'll publish the book, promote it,
take it to conventions, give it a track record so that at the very least it gets reviewed and
noticed. Then it will hopefully become a desirable property for the bigger publishers to take on."
A Conversation With Jane Johnson
An interview with Adam Volk
On problems in publishing:
"The problem with publishing in the genre at the moment, and it is a problem, in the UK at least, is that as publishers
we are not driving the market, we are unable to shape our destinies and those of our authors. Over the past few years
we have found ourselves at the mercy of a book trade which has focused exclusively on high initial turnover and
short-term profits (the genre has traditionally worked as a long lived backlist, word-of-mouth area: so that hits
us hard); a book trade moreover, in which the power resides in the hands of a very few (who therefore have no time
to read, and when they are reading it's rarely fantasy or SF). "
A Conversation With Kij Johnson
An interview with Trent Walters
On doing research:
"It took me seven years to write The Fox Woman. I didn't actually write most of that time; I did desultory
research for months or even a year or more, and then I would slam through writing fifty or so pages of the book in
a week or two; and then I'd stop and do more research. I once figured that if I took out all the down time and research
time, the book could have been written in a year of evenings and weekends. Of course, it wouldn't have been the same book."
Winning with a Bold Streak: an interview with Gwyneth Jones
conducted by Sandy Auden
"Some people are only interested in music when they're teenagers, due to peer pressure; some people stay
interested. I'm one of those, stayed with rock and roll all the way through its permutations, and dare I say it,
stayed with the idealistic hedonism. Bold As Love came from there."
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A Conversation With Gwyneth Jones
Part 2 of an interview with David Soyka
On adapting for the screen:
"I see the Bold As Love books more as TV material, a long-running TV serial, say a series per volume. That would be very
nice, though I can't pretend it's likely. Sometimes our UK serials are wonderful. I don't see the books as translating well into
movies: too many strands. But in a way, secretly, I think Bold As Love (the first volume) is already a movie. The legend
of the Dissolution, Hollywood version, with great chunks of the story left out or simplified and a bewildering thunder of terrible
events smoothed into the classic boy-meets-destiny arc."
A Conversation With Gwyneth Jones
Part 1 of an interview with David Soyka
On the term "adult fairy tale":
"I don't really like the term "adult fairy tale", but it's been plaguing me all my life so I have to accept it's the way people see
my work. The term "fairy" has an interesting provenance. Did you know the "fairy" in that term used to be "fata", i.e.
fate? It seems that, originally, a fairy was a story about fated events, about someone's destiny working out, in noteworthy
ways. (Read all about it in Marina Warner's book From the Beast To The Blonde; Chatto & Windus ISBN 0-7011-3530-1). I
was very pleased with that discovery, it makes a lot more sense than the conventional reading about little people with butterfly
wings -- who don't often feature even in the "dumbed down" versions of the traditional stories."
A Conversation With J.V. Jones
An interview with Jayme Lynn Blaschke
On trilogy endings vs. a single book:
"In a trilogy, because you have so many plot lines, you have lots of little separate endings before the
end. It often takes up half the last book to resolve all the various plot lines. But for the one-off book, it
has one big, bad ending, one mother of an ending at the end -- which is where it's supposed to be."
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