20Mar13 Barbara Barnett interviews kja

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20Mar13 Barbara Barnett interviews kja

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http://blogcritics.org/an-interview-wit ... g-science/



An Interview with Best-Selling Science Fiction Novelist Kevin J. Anderson

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By Barbara Barnett | Wednesday, March 20, 2013
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Kevin J. Anderson has to be one of the busiest science fiction/fantasy
writers in the business. His work has been translated into 30 languages,
and has more than 20 million books in print. Among those are original
novels and novel series, collaborative works with his wife sci-fi author
Rebecca Moesta, Brian Herbert (which expand on Frank Herbert’s classic
Dune universe), and a string of movie and TV tie-in novels from The
X-Files to Star Wars.
In addition to all of his writing endeavors, Anderson and Moesta also have
an e-book publishing business with about 60 titles, they are actively
promoting. It seems like the most hectic of lives to be living while trying
to crank out a continuous string of novels!

His latest novel Hellhole Awakening, part two of a trilogy, is about to be
released by Tor, and just before he goes on tour beginning March 26,
Kevin took the time to sit down and chat about his latest projects— and
his extremely active writers’ life.






Kevin, I must say, your life sounds completely exhausting!

I just drink a lot of coffee and work all the time! When I see in a movie
a writer sitting off in his cabin staring into the distance, waiting for the
muse to suggest a literary phrase to him, and when it doesn’t he goes
out and walks in the woods to be inspired! That is as big as a fantasy
as the movie Independence Day. It’s not the way [professional] work.
Any writer I know who is successful has a schedule kind of like mine.
They’ve always got a million irons on the fire, there’s always something
to promote and something to propose and something to write, something
to rewrite, something to edit, something to research. I love the whole
publishing business and book selling and I love to travelling and seeing
my fans and I can’t think of any job I’d rather do.






How many hours a day do you write? You can’t possibly write 24/7,
but it sounds like you get pretty close to that.


It’s probably a good ten maybe to twelve hours a day that I’m doing
something to do with writing, whether that’s doing an interview, editing,
or actual writing. That’s seven days a week. I’ve got all these stories that
I’m working on. The sooner I finish this story, the sooner I can start this
next story.






You’ve written both for worlds you’ve created, like Hellhole, but also in worlds
created by others: the tie-in novels for Star Wars, The X-Files, even your Dune
novels based on Frank Herbert’s legendary novels. Do you have a preference?
Do you find it more freeing to be writing in your own world or you prefer to write
in someone else’s world where you don’t have to think as much about creating a
unique universe?


The answer is yes.





Care to elaborate?

See I’m a fan boy. I grew up being a fan of science fiction and watching all the
movies and watching the TV shows. We would even run around in the backyard
playing Star Trek! So that was part of my growing up and my introduction to
science fiction. Dune was my favorite science fiction novel of all time, and Star
Wars—I have no idea how many times I saw it in the movie theaters. So it’s really
cool to write stories set in these universes that have already meant so much to me.

There are advantages in that. It’s like you’re climbing aboard a car that already
has a big engine. There are already fans who are going to grab the book because
it says Star Wars on [the cover]; the characters are already [established]. If I
say “Han Solo and Chewbacca flew the Millennium Falcon to Tatooine,” I don’t have
to describe anything; you know Han, you know Chewbacca, you know what the
Millennium Falcon is, and you know Tatooine. But swap out of all those words for
made-up characters from an original novel, and I certainly have to explain to you
everything about.

I’ve got a real head start when I’m writing a book in the Dune universe, for example,
but there are also constraints. I have to follow the rules of that universe. Dune
is very complicated. It has a very intense political setup that’s got lots of rules,
lots of detailed philosophical underpinning, and if you’re going to put on those
shoes, you have to walk the walk, and you have to know what your doing. Of
course the advantage is that you have fans willing to take it up because they
already liked the universe. But the disadvantages is that you have fans that may
be so knowledgeable about the universe, they know more about it than you do,
and they very much want everything exactly perfect.

And of course you have to follow certain rules; I can’t just kill off Han Solo, for
example, or do something that would cause ripple effects in that universe. I can
do that writing in my own universe.

So I like doing both. No matter what book you are writing you’re still operating
within certain constraints. If I set a book in modern day Seattle I’m stuck with
the rules of modern day Seattle. There is certain weather; there is certain
geography. People don’t have flying cars if I want to have a flying car. I can’t
say I feel constraint writing this book in modern day Seattle because I want my
people to have flying cars. As a writer you look at the landscape that you have
to work with and if you have the proper creativity and imagination then you can
tell your story.






When you’re creating a world like Hellhole or with your Zombie P.I., do you start
with a firm idea of what that universe looks like before you set out, or do you
start with a character and plot, or is it more organic than that?


It’s more organic than that because I usually have an idea for the story line of
something. Hellhole is an interesting… You’ve heard about how supposedly an
asteroid hit the Earth and the impact was what caused all the dinosaurs to go
extinct? The lava, the weather patterns, the earthquakes, everything that
happened after the impact wiped everything out. So I thought that would be a
nasty place to colonize as a group of humans. What if we have a planet that’s
been struck by an asteroid say a couple of hundred years ago.

It’s stabilized but still quite a mess and there are people trying to colonize it.
Who would try to colonize a place like that? It certainly wouldn’t be anybody’s
first choice to go and settle down. The people who would be attracted to a
place like that would be the outlaws, the misfits, the religious fanatics, people
on the run from something. I thought, that’s kind of an interesting group people,
they’ve might have a cool story. I’m working with Brian Herbert. I should be
saying ‘we’ for all of this. So Brian and I created this world and an interesting
main character a well. At some point we had been reading about Napoleon about
how he tried this big revolution, and how he failed.
He was exiled to this horrible island.

I thought, how about a character who is this military revolutionary general, and
who tried to overthrow the corrupt galactic empire. But he lost so they exiled him
to Hellhole—of course, he’s more of our heroic guy. He was correct in his
revolution that the government was corrupt. He should have won, but he lost.

He’s the one keeping these people alive on the planet Hellhole. He is helping them
form a colony that can survive the rigors of the volcanic eruptions, and horrible
electrical storms, and earthquakes. Of course, most of the life forms have been
wiped out on the planet, but the ones that did not get wiped out are not going
to be the cute fuzzy teddy bears; they’re going to be the most vicious, nastiest
predators.

The only thing that is left is some pretty nasty insects and animals that are
there. This is how we start talking through it, or when I’m writing myself, this
is how I do it. You have one idea, which usually sparks something else, which
usually sparks something else. It is something I call the collision idea. That you
have one idea going along and then a completely different idea just slams into
it and takes the story in a completely different direction.

For example, in Jurassic Park, you have cloned dinosaurs. The collision comes
when you put them in an amusement park and then something goes wrong. So
with Hellhole you’ve got this colonist on a very nasty planet trying to survive,
and there is a corrupt galactic government. But then they discover the remnants
of an alien civilization that was wiped out during the asteroid impact. Bringing
that alien civilization changes everything. Hellhole used to be a place that nobody
wants until they find oil, or uranium, or natural gas, or something else, and suddenly
everybody wants it.

Now that these exiled people have discovered the remnants of a highly
sophisticated alien race of this planet, everybody wants this hellhole of a planet,
but the colonist don’t want to give it up. That changes the whole story, bringing
us to [the about to be launched novel] Hellhole Awakening, which is about the
colonists’ fight to defend their planet now that the evil, corrupt government wants
it back. We have aliens and monsters and all the fun stuff.






You’ve taken me up in broad strokes through Hellhole and brought me to the
brink of Awakening. So because of this discovery, Constellation, the evil, corrupt
galactic entity, wants this planet back, and your hero General Adolphus isn’t about
to let that happen? So what drives him? You mentioned Napoleon. But Napoleon
was a bad guy; Adolphus is more heroic than that, right?


General Adolphus is very driven by honor. He would have actually won his
rebellion, but in order to win he would have had to do something dishonorable
and he hesitated at the wrong moment. But his nemesis, the rival general on the
other side of the conflict, chose a dishonorable path and he’s now treated as a hero.

Adolphus lost because he wouldn’t kill a bunch of innocent people. Now he’s been
exiled and trying to keep his own people safe, but he’s still sort of quietly running
the revolution. He still wants to overthrow the galactic government, but he wants
to keep his people alive. He wants to keep this colony stable and not let anymore
innocents suffer. And of course now he’s got all these aliens running around… We
wont discuss the details of how the aliens come back and stuff …






Spoiler alert, right?

Yeah. We don’t want to do that. So, it’s just an interesting thing but also
describing almost like the amalgamation process as you start asking one question,
you develop this then it leads to something else. You start building these different
characters and then you put them into the same situations. Then they start
interacting with each other and then some other collision idea will come up. I’ve
never been the sort of writer that is happy with just one character doing one thing
for a couple of days. I’d like to do the grand effect miniseries kind of thing. There
are lots of characters and lots of story lines. If I’m going to create a universe, I
might as well explore it.






Now, this is a trilogy, so there is one more book after Awakening. Does it have
a title yet?


It has two titles. We haven’t picked it yet. It’s either Hellhole Impact or Hellhole
Inferno. It’s probably going to be Hellhole Inferno, but Brian and I are still emailing
and discussing it. Right now, we’re wrapping up the polishes on the next Dune book.
We’re alternating a Dune book and a Hellhole book every other summer.






Have you sketched out the entire Hellhole trilogy?

Oh yeah. Before we wrote page one, we had all three books outlined, at least
the general broad strokes of the story. I think that’s important. I think you need
to know where the trilogy is going to go because a trilogy is like a three-act play.
It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s not just a book that finishes and then
you might come to sequels to it. That’s not what a trilogy is.

A trilogy has a full structure and a story to it. We know what’s going to happen;
I don’t know all the details, but I have the general roadmap. We know how this
character is going to meet his or her end and we know that this is a kind of a
climactic scene that’s going to solve one of the big problems. Hellhole was
published in 2011, now Hellhole Awakening is in 2013, and Hellhole number three
will be in 2015. I don’t want to be writing things next year and go ‘Oh shoot! I
wish I would have just put two sentences back in book one.’
I try to avoid stuff like that.






So, you must work with a very extensive outline.

That’s even more important when you’re working with a collaborator because Brian
is writing half of the chapters and I’m writing half of the chapters. We both better
agree on what the blueprint looks like. Otherwise…your house isn’t going to look
very good if you’ve got a contractor over there building the east wing and you’re
over here building the west wing. Neither of you has the same plan. You’re not
going to have much when you finish up. We brainstorm very carefully. We outline
at great detail and communicate quite a bit as we’re writing so that I come up
with the little detail with him now and vice versa.






Hellhole seems to me very cinematic to me; the images are very strong and vivid.
Have any of your books been put to a screen treatment?


You just keep telling that to people! The producers are going to hear it. I’ve had
things optioned, and there’s always a lot of Hollywood interest. I would love to
see like the Dan Shamble thing turned into a TV series or movies just because
they’re just so funny and so made for that kind of treatment.






Oh, wouldn’t that be fine?

I go to LA several times a year but I’m not the sort of person who lives in LA
who is taking meetings two times a week just to write or pick something. I guess
the stars just have to align. We need to find somebody in the right position who
falls in love with the right one of my projects. I agree with you fully. Hellhole was
a nice cinematic thing, and it should be done as a movie and so should the Dan
Shamble books.






So, let’s move on to your zombie P.I. Dan Shamble…

I’ve always been a monster fan. I’ve always been doing these goofy monster
things in the back of my mind, and having watched and read the Jim Butcher
Harry Dresden stuff, and the Sookie Stockhouse, True Blood things. There’s a
lot of humorous horror out there. I edited three anthologies for Pocketbooks
called Blood Lite that are all humorous horror stories. I’ve done a lot of that,
and I just thought that a hardboiled gumshoe private detective who is also a
zombie— back from the dead, and back on the case, just had all kinds of neat
intrinsic fun to it.

He’s got a bullet hole in his head; somebody came up behind him in an alley and
shot him in the back of his head. But you can’t keep a good zombie detective
down, so he rose up again. This is in a world where there are vampires, werewolves,
ghosts, ghouls, and all that stuff. They all live in a part of the city that’s called
The Unnatural Quarter. They came back from the dead when there was an alignment
of planets, and a virgin’s blood was spilled on an original page of a copy of the
original Necronomicon. It was just a paper cut but it was spilling blood and that
changes the rules of magic, some of the monsters came back.

My character Dan was a normal private eye before his murder, and now he is
now out to solve his own murder. He has got a ghost for a girlfriend who wants
him to solve her murder as well, and here are all kinds of other cases. His partner
in the office is a bleeding heart human lawyer who wants justice for all the monsters;
they’re involved in all kinds of fun lawsuits. There’s a mummy who is suing the
museum to be emancipated because he’s a person damn it, not property! There
are two witches; they’re sisters, but one of them got turned into a big fat cow
because a spell went horribly wrong due to a misprint in the spell book. They’re
suing the publisher for not doing a spell check before publishing.

There is a company called the Jekyll Lifestyle Products and Necroceuticals that
makes deodorant, toothpaste, soap, and everything for the monsters. In fact,
there’s a lip-gloss for zombies that’s called Embalm. They are being sued because
one of their batches of shampoo tailored to vampires got contaminated with garlic
oil so all the vampires’ hair fell out.

The cases are all intertwined, and by the end of the first book, Dan manages to
track down who actually killed him. Every day some monster comes through the
door with a problem. The first book is called Death Warmed Over. The second book
is called Unnatural Acts. The third book will be called The Hair Raising, and that
comes out in May (2013). We also did a short story called “Stake Out at the
Vampire Circus” that you could get as just e-book single. I can keep writing these
year after year. I’ve got pages and pages of notes about how about this, and how
about that, etc. It seems that as fast as I write them I get ten more ideas. I just
hope to keep doing these and I really think that it could go well as a humorous
TV series.






Yeah, airing right after True Blood!

Well, I’ve got to put more nudity and sex in mine, I think.





Does writing these almost serve as a respite from working on the heavier stuff?

It really does. The Dune books and the Hellhole books, they’re 700 to 800 pages
and there are dozens and dozens of main characters. They are big, political, and
traumatic—all kinds of stuff like that. Sometimes it’s nice to just really have fun.
I just get to laugh out loud a lot. I am purely goofy and funny in person. I tell lots
of jokes. Most of my writing is not tailored to be humorous but these ones certainly
are. If you’re expecting serious book, this is not a Walking Dead kind of thing.






I get that. This sounds great.

Dan is a well-preserved zombie who takes great care with his physical appearance
because he doesn’t want to turn into one of those disgusting rotting shamblers
that just can’t be bothered to take care of themselves, and shame on them for
not being able to curb their appetites for brains.







It’s like I get this flash of zombie noir in my head…

Yeah, that’s kind of what it is.





So, let’s shift to Clockwork Angels, which sounds really interesting. Tell me how
you came to create a novel based on the album by [the legendary progressive
rock band] Rush.


I’ve been inspired by progressive rock since like early high school years when I
heard things like Rush’s “2112” and Kansas’ “Leftoverture” and “Point of Know
Return,” as well as Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” They are all music-told stories, and
I used that music to inspire me to write my own stories.

My very first novel called Resurrection, Inc. was entirely inspired by the Rush
album Grace Under Pressure, and I put that in the acknowledgements of the book
when it was published in 1988. I signed copies and mailed them off to the members
of Rush. I just kind of forgot about it for a year. Then, one day I came home and
opened up my mailbox and found that I had a seven-page letter and they’re from
Neil Peart who had read the novel and really enjoyed it. So, this has been a long-
time coming. He reads a lot of my stuff and of course, I’ve listened to all of their music.

Neil and I wrote a short story together called “Drumbeats” and then he wrote
the introduction to one of my short-story collections. W’ve always wanted to
do something a little bit more substantial, something that really brought my
writing together with the lyrics and stories he told of his music. When Rush was
developing their new album called “Clockwork Angels,” it was a big steam-punk
fantasy adventure that had a young man going through this fantastical landscape,
but there’s this villain called the “Anarchist” who wanted to destroy order in the
world. And there is a big-brother type controlling figure called the “Watchmaker”
who wanted to keep everything running perfectly in order and rigidly controlled.
There were airships, and alchemy, and lost cities and wonderful stuff like that
Neil was developing as parts of his songs and as part of the overall structure of
the album.

He and I started talking about it as a more detailed story and I was looking at
it as a novel writer about how does he get from point A to point B and what
changes his attitude to go here and how does this wrap to come there. We
decided that it would be a great project to do a novel version of the album.

The album already has a story in it, but the songs in the album are just little
snapshots. It’s almost like the quick scenes in a movie trailer. You might get
the overall impression of what the story is, but you don’t get all the nitty-gritty
details. So, Neil and I went to Colorado and during one of their concerts out
here, we spent a day climbing a 14,000-foot mountain—because what else do
you do in your day off?

We were brainstorming the real details about the character and the specifics of
his journey and how things would all tie together. Neil had already sent me the
lyrics he was writing and he kept sending them to me as he finished them up. So,
I started to work on that then we got the story and then I applied my story
architect skill. Once we were ready, once the album was nearly finished, I got to
listen to the rough cuts of all the songs. To me, that was really important to hear
the actual songs rather than just reading the lyrics because it’s like a different
delivery method.

I had it outlined and wrote the first draft to that book in less than a month. I
was sending chapters everyday to Neil and he was reading them, making comments,
and sending them back. He wrote some of the sections that were specific to him
about techniques of drumming and things that I don’t know anything about. I just
think it turned out wonderfully. Neil wrote his own little essay for it about how the
project came together. All in all, not only is it just a beautiful fantasy, wonderful
colorful book, it’s of course the fan-voice complete dream to be doing something
like that.






The ultimate fanfiction…

I would tell other people in publishing, even my agent, that I was doing a
novelization of the new Rush album and I would get blank stares. They didn’t
understand how you could a novelization of a Rush album.






But it makes sense, some music—albums, whatever, lend themselves to it…

[The Who’s] Tommy, or somebody doing a novel of 2112, for example. I mean,
that’s just so obvious…But I guess if all you listen to is classical music… But, of
course, even some classical music tells a story.






You could easily could write an entire novel based on Beethoven’s Sixth
Symphony—The Pastoral…


I expect that now that Clockwork Angels was such a big success, and it was on
the New York Times list for two weeks, there will be more. This is from a small
Canadian publisher, and it was the first bestseller ever in the history of their
publishing house.


(Full disclosure: I learned during the course of our interview that Clockwork Angels
is published by ECW Press, publisher of my own Chasing Zebras).









...
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Re: 20Mar13 Barbara Barnett interviews kja

Post by lotek »

brown nose wrote:Care to elaborate?
an attention grabbing hoe wrote:I thought you'd never ask!
In short, the Jihad is over. It ended just as SandRider predicted it would, not with a bang or even a whimper, by simple attrition.
- D. Pope
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