Interview with Daniel Abraham

Q: Both novels will be published by Orbit in the UK this fall. Have other foreign rights been sold thus far?

Yes. It's already out in Germany, and we're also in Poland, Italy, Holland, and France. I'm missing a couple there. It's all over the place.

Q: The fact that there is a website (www.danielabraham.com) dedicated to your work is an indication that interaction with your readers is important to you as an author. How special is it to have the chance to interact directly with your fans?

Special? Odd word. I don't know any author who doesn't delight in interacting with people who enjoy their work. I guess they exist, but I don't hang out with them. So it seems pretty common in that sense. Generally, though, I'm damn pleased to be living in an era when that kind of communication is possible. I think people who read my books tend to be intelligent, compassionate, usually better looking than average, and generally good folks.

I'm half kidding. Only half, though. There's a lot of how I think and see the world in these books. People who spark to that seriously do tend to be the sort of people I spark to too.

Q: A Shadow in Summer is the living proof that the internet can provide a lot of exposure for a book. Do you feel that most publishers don't yet understand the full potential of this tool, in terms of exploiting the wealth of fantasy-related websites, message boards, and blogs?

I don't think anyone understands the full potential of the tool. I worked tech support for ten years at an ISP, so I was swimming in the internet 40 hours a week plus whatever I did at home, and I'm pretty sure I don't grok the fullness.

The thing is, the internet is literally the biggest single machine humanity has ever built. There is room on it for a semi-infinite number of communities dedicated to a semi-infinite variety of enthusiasms, and the one thing they all hate is getting marketed to. Imagine a new author getting a listing of every fantasy-related message board and blog, and hitting all of them to talk about how great her book was. I know I'd look on her with pity and disgust. More spam? Great, because that was what I needed. Wrote the spam yourself? Bite me.

On the other hand, being a part of a community draws a lot of water. Creating a community is even better. How to do that, promote your book, and not be one step shy of spam? That's tricky.

Q: You appear to be a prolific short fiction writer. Are there any plans to one day put together a collection of short stories?

Plans? You betcha. But I'm not doing anything until I can reprint the story I have in Klima's Logorrhea anthology. I really like that one.

Q: How was the process of writing for the interstitials on Inside Straight? Arguably, they're one of the key -- maybe _the_ key -- parts of a book of that kind, as it bridges the various individual stories and pulls them together into a cohesive whole.

It was right on the edge between writing and improvisational theater. There was some reshuffling -- no pun -- as the book took shape, and my part had to shift constantly to keep up. I was lucky in that my character has a blog, so I had a lot of tools to get information across to the reader without having to make characters explain things to each other for your benefit. And my guy in Inside Straight was funny. He was the Han Solo character. I always thought the Wild Cards universe needed more Han Solos.

Seriously, though, the fact that I could take a light tone sometimes and a dark one in others made it a lot of fun. As a storytelling exercise, it was tough, and the interstitial material was threatening to be long enough to classify as a novel all by its lonesome, but I think what came out of it was pretty spiffy.