| Lynn Abbey QUOTES |
| A dozen years is a long time in the world of publishing. The market is more fragmented and competitive than ever, and overall readership is down. Finding a niche is the first challenge; inserting a book into that niche is the second. |
| A good editor-and I don't claim to be one-can deduce the ideal elements of a writer's style and story and administer the necessary guidance to trick the writer into revealing it. |
| A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story. |
| A year or so ago, I considered writing a mainstream novel and, despite several time-consuming efforts, I just couldn't come up with a concept that made my ears wiggle and didn't involve fantasy-genre elements. |
| All authors are created equal, but, as the editor, I'm somewhat more equal than all the others. |
| As an author, you're usually responsible for both the creation and evolution of your characters, but in a shared world, the evolution of your character is at least partially determined by what your character does in response to situations you didn't create. |
| Because I'd been involved in the creation of a successful shared-world it was assumed that I'd know the rules in other shared worlds, so the invitations flowed my way. |
| Before I was a writer I was a computer programmer. |
| Compatibility problems are touchier. Sometimes author A does something that sends author B right through the roof and the editor has to scramble to play peacemaker. |
| Continuity problems are fairly straightforward, with absolute conflicts being the easiest to resolve. If writer A and writer B both lay claim to the same piece of real estate or character, it's usually possible to come up with a chronology that allows both stories to exist. |
| Contractual considerations are very important in shared-world or work-for-hire situations. I make sure I know exactly what's expected. |
| During the many centuries that magic, here on this planet, was presumed to have worked, there were at least as many theories as to how magic worked as there were cultures and religions. |
| Editorial processes are subjective, based on what's available at a given moment in time, and ultimately unfair. |
| Editors of invitation-only anthologies tend to be a secretive lot. We're looking for very specific things in our story mix and know the voices we're looking for to round out the chorus. |
| Editors of open anthologies actively seek submissions from all comers, established and unknown. They are willing to read whatever the tide washes up at their feet. |
| Every so often I'd be able to write a scene with greater flourish because I'd gotten lucky with my words as I was writing them down, but no surprises. |
| Flaws of style and sequence would fairly leap off the page and the means to correct them would, too. |
| For a good fiction writer-and that includes writers of SF and Fantasy-there is simply no such thing as useless research. I never pass up an opportunity to learn how something is made or used. |
| For me, the rise and fall of the 1980s incarnation of TW was deeply personal and intertwined with the rise and fall of my marriage to co-editor, Robert Asprin. |
| For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel. |
| Friends who are not writers try to be sympathetic and understanding of a writer's mood, but, truly, it takes one to know one. |
| Gamers, especially the game masters, who are the primary audience for any game box, want precision because that's what the players want. |
| Getting the new anthologies up and running has had its share of unexpected pitfalls. I hope I'm not being naive or unduly optimistic when I think that, time-wise, the worst is over. |
| I always make sure I have an escape clause that allows me to pull my name off a project if I have to abandon it. |
| I can usually tell the difference between a short story idea and a novel-length one when someone describes the idea to me. |
| I construct timelines for each story and a master timeline for sequencing the stories in the volume. |
| I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I've never been able to sell. I'm known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre. |
| I do keep a small file of samples from not-yet-invited authors. The cold, cruel fact is that I wouldn't be doing any of them a favor if I asked for a story. |
| I don't have any signed contracts right now, but my agent's out there shaking the bushes vigorously. |
| I don't so much think of myself a fantasy writer as a writer of histories of places that don't exist. I'd like to write the histories of places and people that have existed, but I've never been satisfied with the completeness of my research. |
| I don't strive for perfect continuity, which is good, because I'd never achieve it. |
| I guess it's good to be known for something. |
| I have a problematic relationship with magic: when push comes to shove, I don't believe in it. |
| I have some history books that I come back to when I'm trying to debug my worlds. |
| I love writing Thieves' World, but I feel a responsibility, too, to the other authors. I've lost many nights' sleep worrying if I've made the sandbox too large, too small. |
| I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath. |
| I was one of those rare and fortunate writers who did not go through an amateur period of creating unpublished/unpublishable fiction. I didn't actually start writing with professional intent until a golden opportunity fell into my lap. |
| I went to Oklahoma to recover from a shattering divorce and I couldn't have found a better, safer haven, but in time I realized that I needed to be closer to my parents, which entailed moving to Florida. |
| I wish I knew how to imagine a short story, because I rather like the form, but they're too time-consuming for me to write on a regular basis. |
| I write sets of books, but I've also written a lot of orphans. |
| I'm a writer first and an editor second... or maybe third or even fourth. Successful editing requires a very specific set of skills, and I don't claim to have all of them at my command. |
| I'm always trolling for trivia. |
| I'm currently working on my third book about Emma Merrigan, curse hunter and university librarian. |
| I'm dense when it comes to discouragement. |
| I'm no athlete and my piano lessons were going nowhere; I got good marks in school, but there were always kids who outshined me-until I wrote a short story. |
| I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published. |
| I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's god-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books. |
| I've always seen Thieves' World from two perspectives-as a business property and as a creative sandbox. |
| I've developed a reputation as someone who can turn a sow's ear into a silk purse when it comes to pulling a story out of a murky milieu, and that keeps my name in circulation. |
| I've done a lot of shared-worlds and work-for-hire. Ask me if I think it's always been good for my career and the unequivocal answer is No, but it's paid the bills when the bills. |
| I've got two degrees in medieval history. |
| I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium. |
| I've thought about writing in other genres, but my imagination just doesn't seem to lead me in other directions. |
| Ideas are a writer's cheapest commodity. If I never had another idea, I still couldn't write my way through all the notions rattling around in my hindbrain this morning. |
| Ideas aren't magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down. |
| If all my dreams come true, I'll have a chance to write a straight-up historical... It won't be an easy task... My Latin's gotten very rusty over the years. |
| If I aim for a short-story idea, I then get to spend the next portion of my life removing 90,000 words from what my imagination generated. |
| If I want to write SF, I'll have to write it under another name. |
| If you write, one of the questions you're always trying to answer is, Where do you get your ideas? And, if you write, you know how pointless a question this is and how difficult it is to answer. |
| In a general sense, all my protagonists eventually find themselves in situations so totally beyond their control that all they can do is hunker down and trust their fallible guts. |
| In my high-school sophomore English class, we were given that hoary old assignment: write a short story. The Berlin Wall had just gone up and I decided to write a short story about a group of friends whose lives had been divided. |
| In the last few years I've become more reliant on the Internet for research. I'm addicted to Google. |
| In the process of defending the integrity of my story, I would clean up the structural problems without focusing on them. I've used it myself with the writers I've mentored. |
| It took me about 12 years to reach my million-word mark. The challenge now is to continue to challenge myself. |
| It's been a long time since I've written old-fashioned sword and sorcery; I'm hoping it's like riding a bicycle. |
| It's been great to work cooperatively with a group of talented authors again, but the book world has become an unforgiving place and it remains to be seen if Thieves' World can reestablish a toehold in a sufficient number of imaginations to become a regularly scheduled product. |
| It's harder to get stand-alone material published, but it's worth the wait and effort, and then, if you really want to do a Star Trek novel, you can pretty much dictate the terms. |
| It's only recently that the special effects industry has evolved enough to be able to handle the demands of fantasy and/or science fiction economically enough that there's enough money left over to buy a decent script. |
| It's possible to become so comfortable with one's style and structure that one ceases to grow. |
| Last year I went on a Venice jag and now I'm planning a fantasy that's set in an environment that's not quite Venice but owes a lot to last year's reading. |
| Magic works differently for every author who's written for the series. |
| Magical realism is based on magical magic, that is, the happening of things that cannot be explained by the characters and are not explained by the author. |
| Most books don't translate successfully into movies and one of the criticisms against an author like John Grisham, whose books are regularly made into movies, is that he's actually writing screenplays, not novels. |
| Most readers seemed to like the never-ending conflict, but politics is not sword and sorcery, and Thieves' World, at its best, was down-and-dirty sword and sorcery. Sales were starting to drop off. |
| My magic is always empirical-it can be analyzed and replicated. |
| My parents might say that I started telling stories when I learned to talk and decided that I'd become a writer the day I recognized a typewriter. |
| My professional career began in early 1977 when I was recuperating from an auto accident. With one ankle broken and the other severely sprained, I found myself thinking that I could write a novel. |
| My reading is pre-screened. It takes a special talent to read dozens and dozens of stories looking for the handful that merit inclusion in a magazine or anthology. |
| My teacher decided that some of stories needed to be read aloud. I read without interruption-I mean totally without interruption: there wasn't a sound in the classroom until I finished and then my fellow students and my teacher applauded. |
| My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history. |
| Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured. |
| No one uses a ribbon typewriter any more, but your final draft is not the time to try to wring a few more sheets out of your inkjet cartridge. |
| Nothing is too obscure for my interest. You just never know when some quirk of science or history is going to prove useful. |
| On the one hand, I'm looking for good stylists and storytellers who can play well with others and, on the other, I'm trying to keep Tor happy by delivering a manuscript they can market the heck out of. |
| Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy. |
| One of my great passions is the collection of historical trivia. |
| One of the risks I took was turning one of the classic fairy-tale tropes on its head. Fairy-tales tend to be about young people on the brink of adulthood discovering their destiny, powers. I had a heroine who was far enough into her adulthood to be thinking about golden years and retirement plans. |
| Our authors spent as much time conspiring with one another as they did writing their stories. Over time, this meant that we published fewer stories complete in and of themselves and many, perhaps too many, that never really came to a satisfactory conclusion. |
| Our little writer's colony existed for about three years and it would take nearly that long to share the stories we accumulated. |
| Persistence pays and so does a willingness to follow directions. |
| Right now I think the most interesting SF and fantasy is being done in serial television where a few sets and what have devolved into moderate-price special effects are used to support an ensemble cast and stories that focus on characters. |
| Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment. |
| Some of the best advice I can give an aspiring author is trivial. Most times an editor doesn't know you from a hole in the wall when he/she opens the envelope containing your story. That manuscript is your avatar-it stands for you and makes your first impression. |
| Thanks to bigger and better computers and their indexing capacities, I hope to keep a tighter control on what is, or isn't, in the canon, but there will always be inconsistencies, deliberate and accidental. |
| That bedrock faith that I could write was what blinded me to attempts to discourage me. |
| The actual process of selling my first novel was exciting at the time. I was no longer an apprentice but had become a journeyman. |
| The books I've written for gaming companies are a like games of miniature golf where the object is to weave an interesting story through an obstacle course. |
| The money can be decent, but I really don't recommend the work-for-hire route as an entry into publishing. Too many things can go wrong. |
| The most annoying risk that I find associated with work-for-hire situations is somebody's always trying to move the goal posts. It's a good idea to nail those suckers down before I start the first draft. |
| The quality of editing in the work-for-hire world is generally a few notches below what you'd find elsewhere, and I've had a few run-ins with editors who thought they were really collaborators. That can be very annoying. |
| There is nothing that compares to an unexpected round of applause. |
| There's a lot of hearsay and worse out on the Internet and, though I write fiction, I like to think that my background information is solid. |
| Thieves' World is otherwise known as the project that ate my life in the '80s. |
| Time really can heal wounds. By the mid-90s, when I realized that I was signing books that were older than the readers offering them to me, I began to reconsider my position. |
| To feel free enough to write at all, I have to give my research a twist that allows me to say, Okay, this is NOT 12th century France. |
| We're out to prove the naysayers wrong. Maybe a shared-world anthology can't hit the bestseller lists in this day and age, but one, at least, is going to survive. |
| We've had a few inquiries from companies and individuals looking to develop an interactive, web-based game but, to date, none of them have progressed to the contract and license stage. |
| Were I to decide that I didn't want to be a genre writer, or that I wanted to switch genres, I'd be looking at starting over. |
| When done well, the shared universes are richer than their single-creator counterparts. |
| When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat. |
| When I started out, I thought being a writer was all about writing. Writing is important, but the business of a writer is publishing and the realities of publishing can be very limiting, even unpleasant. |
| When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery. |
| When I'm writing my own material, I've full control over creation and evolution, vertical and horizontal, the whole nine yards. It's the most satisfying type of writing, and also the most difficult because while all the triumphs are mine, so are all the mistakes. |
| Whenever I encounter an article that makes my ears wiggle, I give it a number, write a summary for my database and put the article in a file cabinet. Searching the database is faster and easier than trying to have a fancy filing system. |
| Writing genre fantasy requires a few more research twists, most of them involving magic. By the time I start the first draft, whatever magic system I've built is meant to seem fundamental to the world I've created, but it's really an afterthought. |
| You usually don't get the copyright or reprint rights in a shared-world or work-for-hire situation, so your ability to make additional money off your work is limited. |
