*Have any other writings influenced the series, or your work as a whole?*
That's a hard question to answer. Tolkien certainly inspired me to write epic fantasy. Dickens and Twain made me want to write memorable characters; Jane Austen witty dialogue; Jack London darn good adventure...and so on. I'm an avid reader, and I think it's fair to say that almost everything I read has some effect upon my writing. It might be something as small as an author's use of a particular word or phrase. Or sometimes something as substantial as the icy settings in C.S. Lewis' THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, and Ursula K. LeGuin's THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS.

*What are you reading at the moment?*
At the moment I'm reading THE MONKS OF WAR by Desmond Seward, which is a history of Western military religious orders, such as the Templers and the Teutonic Knights. I'm not an actual bonafide history buff (my memory is too poor for that), but I'll read pretty much any historical tome that comes my way. I'm especially fond of books that shed light on how people actually *lived*in times gone by; how they cooked, dressed, talked, argued - the nitty gritty of life rather than a catalog of dates and treaties.

As for fiction, I've just finished Alice Munro's latest collection of short stories HATESHIP, FRIENDSHIP, COURTSHIP, LOVESHIP, MARRIAGE. It was so good I restricted myself to one story a night to make the book last longer.

How do you think the fantasy genre will develop over the next ten years? In my view, the major problem that fantasy had from the mid-sixties, when it suddenly became popular, to (say) the mid-eighties, was that it had become popular too quickly. There was a great demand for fantasy literature, which meant that it was relatively easy to get published (compared to other genres) and a lot of writers and publishers who didn't really care about the genre jumped into it. The quality of writing in 'popular' fantasy, in my opinion, was the worst in any genre and a lot of big selling books were so badly written that it was embarrassing to read them. That situation has changed over the last decade or two as fantasy has become a mature genre and there are now many good writers at the 'popular' end of the genre.

I think the fantasy market will continue to grow for a while yet, aided by the Harry Potter phenomenon (which has greatly increased the sales of a number of fantasy classics) and hopefully by the LORD OF THE RINGS movies. I think fantasy will become a mainstream genre, but at the same time it will become harder to get published. I hope it will continue to develop but I know the public's tastes can change, as they have with other genres such as westerns and horror from time to time. Genres can quickly go out of fashion due to changes in our society, though I think fantasy will persist. It is, after all, the oldest of all genres, as well as the broadest.

*What did you think of the Lord of the Rings movie, and how do you think it will effect people's perception of genre fiction?*
I loved the movie. A lot of people have criticized it, saying that it's not a faithful account of the book, but I think they're missing the point. A movie is not a book; different rules apply to each medium. LOTR was a great action-adventure movie; it had awe-inspiring visuals, endearing characters, and great fight scenes...and that's more than what most films have today.