Do you get along with your muse? What do you do to placate her when she refuses to inspire you?
I’d like to say sacrifice white kid goats, but alas it isn’t that dramatic. The muse and I have an uneasy truce. Sometimes she won’t take no for an answer and I write for ten hours a day – and the ship of story fairly flies forward at ramming speed as I row furiously under her whip. Other times I have to beg her to come for a visit, after I’ve been stuck at the same scene for a week. But we come to an accommodation, somehow, she and I. I think that the sacrificial libation of choice is coffee, personally – because once the juices start flowing I can sit and drink coffee in quantities that would probably kill a normal human being and simply… write. I think she siphons off much of that coffee. And everyone’s content.
From the moment you conceived the idea for the story, to the published book, how long did it take?
For which book? The fastest it ever happened, it was 6 months from idea to book-in-bookstores. But more often, on average, it takes about a year to go through the publication stages – if all goes smoothly and all parts of the process go without any major hitches. I’ve hit hitches before; I try to do my very best to deal with problems, if they arise, as quickly and professionally as I can – but there are often times or circumstances that are beyond one’s control, and then you just have to grit your teeth and hurry up and wait.
Describe your working environment.
Home office, with a sliding door that opens into cedar woods and where I often get visitations from passing deer. Large oak desk with hutch containing copies of my books in all their myriad languages and one stuffed white beanie-baby dragon. Messy desk which gets cleaned up only in between actual projects but DURING a project the accumulation of notes and papers and books I’m using for research purposes and pens and Post-It pads and all the paraphernalia of a working writer often makes it hard to see the surface of the desk at all. It isn’t chaos, really – it just looks that way. I know where everything IS. Ask me to put my hands on any specific piece of material in that pile of stuff, and you
Do you write non-stop until you have a first draft, or do you edit as you move along?
A little bit of both, depending on the project. I’ll often do it a chapter at a time, writing a zeroth draft, fixing the bloopers in that sufficiently to produce something like a smooth first draft, and then forging ahead – with the final edit reserved for when the entire work is complete.
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