Page 4 of 5
(2003-02-11)
RB: Any other current writers you’ve been reading or mainly sticking to the research reading and writing?
GK: Unfortunately, I don’t really get to read as much of my peers as I’d like to. I will say the last, trying to remember what I last read that wasn’t research....modern writers in the Fantasy field, I think one really important writer is Sean Stewart. I think Mockingbird was an awesome book, a little off the wall for fantasy almost more of that magical realism. I think some of his other work is incredibly good, I think Stover is doing some interesting things, too. All the authors you mentioned I haven’t read nearly enough. I think Nicola Griffith is an interesting voice in the past decade.
Part of the problem is that it’s daunting how many people there are to read and a lot of them are worth reading. Right now I’ve been too busy to do the field justice.
RB: Has the genre success like the Locus bestseller and Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire colored your writing at all?
GK: Neither in particular, I’ve won a couple of other awards for my first couple of books. If anything changes the way I’m writing, hopefully I’m maturing I’m learning more about what works and what doesn’t as I move along. The Locus bestseller, that’s really interesting, it’s not quite the same thing as NYT bestseller. To me it was just a vindication, because I’ve been working somewhat outside the mainstream of the genre, in some ways, even my first two novels. Though they were ostensibly high fantasy, but the background that went into them was a little strange, it was mostly central Asian and North American Indian as opposed to European and medieval. The Briar King is really my first shot at the sort of medieval.
RB: Big Fat Fantasy...
GK: (laughs) Yeah, the Big Fat Fantasy (laughs), it’s really my first shot at it and I feel, especially The Age of Unreason which was a real chance in a lot of ways, especially in the market that I wrote it in. It was really nice to be vindicated both in terms of sales and critical recognition I guess.
RB: You were saying how your writing has grown. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet read The Chosen of The Changeling, but from the first book in the Unreason books, Newton’s Cannon, you could see your growth through the series, and it’s always nice to see that in a writer.
GK: Thanks, of course the first book in that series was a lot different than the others. One of the main things with the first book is that around 200 pages were cut out of it, mostly by a line-editor. Often amounted to cutting every third or fourth word or whole sentences. Then Once I got a chance to from the editor and brush it up. Because of that, as a whole it comes off a lot terser than the following three books. At times I think thinner.
RB: Yeah, I think I know what you’re saying.
GK: I had a friend that read the first one and read the second one and she asked how many years elapsed between the two. I said none I started the second immediately after finishing the first one. She said the style is really different. I certainly hope I got better because it took me four years to write those.
RB: This may be a bit of an odd question, but why the move from "J. Gregory Keyes" to "Greg Keyes?"
GK: (laughs) That actually happened when I wasn’t looking. Essentially my name is John Gregory Keyes, it’s the name I was born with. I’ve always been called Greg by my friends and family since my father’s name is John. When I sold my first novel, The Waterborn, Del Rey gave it a pretty good push, they made it a hardback, they put it through a publicity campaign. At one point my editor at the time, Veroncia Chapman asked if Greg was my first or middle name. I said its my middle name, so she asked my first name, I told her John. I heard her turn around and say "It’s John" and maybe 10 or 15 people clapping.
RB: I guess they must have had a bet or something going on.
GK: I asked what was going on, she said they were hoping for something with J. I asked why? They said that they feel Greg Keyes was too terse a name for a fantasy author, a science fiction writer maybe, fantasy no. Would you mind being J. Gregory Keyes? I said, Well if you think it will really make a difference... it doesn’t really matter to me. So that’s how we went with "J. Gregory Keyes."
When I wrote the Star Wars book they chopped it back down to Greg Keyes, was more science fiction and terser. And also frankly, they wanted to make my licensed set apart. They maybe wanted to pull more SW readers to The Briar King. Not quite sure, but anyway the book ended up with Greg Keyes. It doesn’t really matter to me, I think people are smart enough to figure out we are the same person. And frankly, it would be nice to pull over SW readers. Not sure how much cross-over there is between licensed and original fiction. I certainly know there are people who read nothing but SW.
RB: Have you seen yet if any readers are going from SW to original stuff.
GK: I think some have, but I don’t know statistically or anything. Often I’ll get fan letters from people who read my SW books and then read the Unreason books. One of my biggest boosters has been a guy on Jedi.net who became originally interested because I did some interviews and chats with them about the SW books, but he’s ended up reading everything I’ve ever written and he boosts them on the site, which is really nice. It’s a pretty well read SW site.
RB: It seems to me that’s one good thing The New Jedi Order is doing. For me at least, it got me reading the books because of the authors writing them. It seems that it will have the converse effect, the people reading the SW books will go to the respective author’s original fiction. At least from browsing online discussion boards, it seems a lot of people that have read Matt Stover’s NJO entry, Traitor have read that book and gone to his original fiction.
GK: His was really quite different, even for NJO. Traitor was a stand-out in a lot of ways. Some people didn’t like it, some people don’t like mine. The funny thing about SW is, I went to amazon and read the reader reviews, I’d say to me from the reader reviews, but it could be an artifact of who writes reviews and who doesn’t but the vast majority of people that have read mine have liked them. And then the vocal minority doesn’t like and a small minority thinks they are the best SW written.
RB: Yeah, I think they are two of the stronger books in the NJO.
GK: Thanks, but there are also a handful of people who hate them period. "The worst SW books ever written are the ones written by J. Gregory Keyes." And the funny thing is you’ll read these guys reviews, and they’ll say something like "Greg Keyes should never be allowed to write another SW book, but I will buy his next one because it is SW, but he shouldn’t be writing them." Which is bizarre.
RB: I guess it’s the addictive nature of Star Wars.
GK: Yeah, I think so. I agree the New Jedi Order has been really interesting in terms of who the writers are they have brought in and its sort of a new direction. I don’t say that in any way to say the previous Star Wars writers aren’t interesting.
RB: Oh I know.
GK: Just the diversity of the talent they’ve brought to New Jedi Order is startling.
RB: So the next is hardcover?
GK: No, the last is hardcover, I believe by James Luceno. Mine’s the paperback that leads into it.
RB: With every new fantasy, it somehow gets compared to Tolkien. I don’t want to sound clichéd, but I did see resemblances, not quite as much to the world it self but your approach is very similar... in terms of your interest in language. The Briar King himself sort of reminded me of the Ents in a way...
GK: (laughs) Actually its been so long, even though I’m a Tolkien fan, since I’ve read the trilogy probably since High School which has been a long time. So lately I’ve been seeing the movies and kind of forgotten about the Ents. But a lot of things get buried in your subconscious and they come back out. The other thing that fascinated me as a kid the most about Tolkien was the appendices...Reading it thinking, "Wait he’s got those all worked out....he’s got languages here, he’s got history," then The Silmarillion came out and it’s even just more of the same. That was just fascinating to me. And this was just before, not long before, nevertheless before the mass-marketing of role-playing games. This idea of world-building to that extent was not really around and I immediately started building a world. Not the world of The Briar King, nothing I every really used. I started working on languages and that’s my biggest debt to Tolkien. Of course I wanted to know where Tolkien got all that from, Norse mythology, Celtic mythology, that’s where my interest in it came from, spurred by Tolkien. So my debt to Tolkien is enormous, but I don’t think it’s particularly specific it that makes any sense. 
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