I told her to say in her acceptance speech that she owed all her skill to me, but I gather she forgot to say that. <laughs>

Let's see, other details. I was recently teaching a writing class at a local college here -- University of Redlands -- because a friend of mine abruptly retired. And I may go on next year to do some more of that, though I'm hampered by not having a proper degree for it.

I think the distinction between science fiction and fantasy is an arbitrary one. Generally people who write one also write the other. And so when I'm writing I never think, you know, "Is this one science fiction? Is this one horror?" I just think "Well, it's that stuff. We'll certainly have something like ghosts wandering around, and..."

And I don't actually read that stuff very much anymore. When I was, I dunno, up to about age 21 that was about all I read. And so I've read all of Sturgeon and Henry Kuttner and Heinlein, and all those people. Alfred Bester. But as far as my contemporaries go, I really haven't read anybody. Which in a way makes it easier to meet them socially. Nah, I just don't read this stuff. And instead all my reading is mostly mainstream, really. My favourite authors are Kingsley Amis, John D. MacDonald. I like Tom Wolfe real well. And I do think this is good, as an incidental effect, for my writing because when I'm putting together a plot or characters or something, I can think "Oh, do that trick Kingsley Amis did, do that thing Dick Francis did, or Tennesee Williams." And this is sort of a broader toolkit.

I think, especially seeing a lot of Clarion manuscripts, I think some people want to write science fiction and fantasy who've only read science fiction and fantasy, and this kind of necessarily gives an anemic tone to their stuff. I think that the more eclectic all your inputs are, the more you'll be able to synthesize from. Certainly when I look at my own stuff, which I don't do all that often, I see way more things that I recognize as being derived from Thomas Pynchon, for example, than, I dunno, Heinlein.

So yeah, I guess I get most of my ideas from reading non-fiction. And I don't do it deliberately. It's all non-fiction I was just reading because it was interesting, but in the midst of it I'll suddenly say "Gee, you know what Powers, you could make a book out of this here." So it's always kind of an accident. I never go looking for these ideas, I just sort of stumble on them. And sometimes they've got to wait years before I get to them. I do have one little notebook that I scratch these things down in, and then whenever I finish a book I haul the notebook down and think "Well, whaddya got? What is there?"

In fact, this story I wrote for the 999 anthology -- I was in the midst of writing the spy book when the 999 editor called and said "Why don't you write me a short story?" And I said, "Nah, I'm in the middle of a spy novel. I can't be taking time off to write a short story." And he called me over and over again, so finally I hauled down my notebook of old ideas and said, you know, find three or four that could plausibly be part of the same story and... and I did. I thought well, this thing's kind of cool, and that business over there's pretty neat, could be in the same story. And why don't you hang it on that third thing over yonder, and see if you can't make a story out of it.

It's all in the outline and the calendar. I try to make my outlines infinitely detailed. I even have bits of dialogue in the outline, ready for use. For one thing it's a cure for writer's block. What am I supposed to write today? Well, there it is, look all the descriptions are there, you've even got some of the bits of dialogue already laid out. Just, you know, put that into a thousand words.

I always have this sort of forlorn wish that the outline could just gradually patch by patch become the final book. But yeah, I just outline like a bastard. By the time I start writing, there is no spontaneity anywhere on the landscape. If I see a patch of spontaneity, I'll go over with a bucket and put it out before I start.

I like Jung's idea that these things really do resonate in us, and even some kid brought up in totally sterile surroundings, never exposed to any of this, would still get shivers when he heard these old stories -- that it's part of the hardware of his brain. I suppose I'm using my own prejudices in what bits of these mythologies I decide are the potent bits.

Then I kind of calculate, okay, how would this work on a day to day basis? What would happen, how would it show up if it was to suddenly manifest itself while you were driving to the store to buy cat food? What would you see, what would happen? And I try to have it impinge on physical day to day stuff. Although I do try real hard -- I shouldn't even admit this -- but I do try real hard to keep that shivery Jungian "oh my god, what's going on here" type tone.

And I've got in each case a bunch of actual names to point to, to imply to the reader "Look, I'm not making this up. I mean, you can check this stuff out on your own, man. I'm just quoting all this. This is all real." Like, you know, with Dionysus I say "Hey don't take my word for it, read Euripides -- I'm just copying this stuff out, man, I'm not making this up." And I hope that gives it a tone of authority and plausibility for the reader.

But yeah, one of the advantages of the science fiction and fantasy field is you can have a guy talk to his own self at different ages, you can have a guy meet his mother when she was young, as in Back to the Future, you can have a guy talk to his father's ghost -- all these things that mainstream writers just aren't allowed to do, but which are really useful for wringing emotion out of your characters that you couldn't really derive if you were restricted to the mainstream set of rules.

I've always had the idea that ghosts would not be very bright, that they would tend to be like very old people just repeating old stories all the time. A lot more ROM than RAM. And I always figured that they don't have any business really being here, that them hanging around is kind of like somebody who at age 19 and 20 still hangs around the high school cafeteria, unwilling to move on as they should.

So when they said they didn't like the Francis Thompson quote as a title, I looked at the story again and derived the present title from the world travels of that ceramic lawn duck. And I think it's a better title, just because with "Eve Be Soon" or "Dawn Be Sudden" people would, you know, finish the story and say, so what?

In fact, the house he goes to as a ghost to stay at is this house I'm sitting in right now. I can see the trees out in the backyard now where he found the initials carved in the trunk, and I can see from here the little patch by the rosebush where his uncle had stashed the beer, and when we first moved here, shortly before I wrote that story, the place did have that sort of abandoned air to it. We did plant an avocado tree, but it I'm afraid has died. We're going to have to plant another. I can see the spot from where I'm sitting here though, where it was in the story.

In the 80s there, writing horror, they were pretty much ditching the whole supernatural side of it, which always struck me as the main strength of it. It always strikes me that in a fantasy or horror story, the main thing isn't the scariness, the main thing is that sense of dislocation or vertigo, that kind of awe and feeling of diminishment in the face of real supernatural. Just as chickens brought up in a warehouse and who've never seen the sky still flinch at the silhouette of a hawk, I think humans -- even though we have all of our materialistic telephones and VCRs and whatnot -- still have that circuitry in our heads that makes us flinch and get goosebumps at any hint of real supernatural. And I think it's interesting that all of the Darwinian evolution that made us stop being covered with fur, and made us stop having our foreheads stick out two inches past our noses, nevertheless left us that circuitry to be scared of the dark, scared of ghosts. And I think that's the direction horror has to pursue if it's going to survive. We have to get that -- well Stephen King can do it, at least in books like The Shining -- that real, sort of lost feeling you get. You're not even so scared that the dead lady's going to hike up out of the tub and strangle you, just the mere fact of a ghost is almost too shocking to survive.

When I was a kid -- you know you'd be scared of the dark, alone in your room -- I would think, "If I open my eyes and see a face hanging in the air next to the bed, I'm going to expire, I'm just going to die." And it doesn't matter if that face is hostile, or just curious. In the face of the supernatural I think I would just flop down dead. And I do think that sort of thing can be incorporated into contemporary settings. Fritz Leiber always did it really well. Lovecraft did it; you know that was contemporary New England when Lovecraft was writing. And I do think it's especially effective if you do it well in a contemporary setting. I mean, it's one thing to read about a witch stirring a cauldron in medieval Scotland or something -- you sort of say "Oh well, so what?" But if a writer can convince you that there really are ghosts at a drive-in theatre in Palm Springs, it's more immediate, it's more effective.

I guess because of being Catholic, I'm stuck with believing that there is some ultimate substance to that kind of thing, and I just want not to have anything to do with it at all. I mean, I'm a totally rational person -- I know physics, I know astronomy, I have no problem with the universe being 50 billion years old, et cetera. But at the same time I don't entirely rule out supernatural stuff, and I don't want to mess with it at all.

Sometimes people do at conventions come up and say, "Oh, let me do a Tarot card reading for you!" Noooooo, I'm getting out of here.

It was really fun to do a sort of John Le Carre-type book. I have always loved him. And it was real fun to deal with all that British secret service stuff, and the KGB, and Arabs and Lawrence of Arabia-type stuff.