Interview with Peter Watts

Q: What can you tell us of your upcoming projects?

This implies that there are going to be any.

I'm actually pretty burned out after Blindsight -- not so much the writing per sé, but the whole business life of the midlist writer. Blindsight has been getting amazing reviews. People keep talking about it as a potential award-winner (and it might have been, if Worldcon wasn't scheduled for Japan in '07). And yet, seven major publishers turned it down flat, and the eighth - well, let's just say the cover art was the tip of the iceberg. When I started down this road I would sit at my keyboard, wired with excitement, thinking about how best to explore an idea. Now, I sit and wonder how many of those explorations will get mutilated because the market has changed again and the bean-counters only concern with "story" is whether the paper it's printed on will retail for less than $24.95. (And to preempt those who might think I'm just another whiney author with an inflated sense of the deathlessness of his prose; even my editor has choked on these constraiints. He was forced to ask me to cut four thousand words from Blindsight while at the same time admitting that he couldn't see any way to do that without compromising the story. And that was after I'd already cut several K from the submitted draft. And that was after submitting a draft that was ten thousand words shorter than the contract called for, because my previous novel got split in half for being too long and I wanted to make sure that never happened again.)

So, yes. There may be other projects. I still have novels incubating in my head - I'm even playing with the idea of a faux-documentary coffee-table book called "Proceedings of the First Biennial Conference on the Evolutionary and Biology of Vampires", although Tor has told me they aren't interested. But for the moment, at least, the fun has gone out of it.

Q: Many thanks again for taking the time to answer our questions. We wish you continued success in your writing career and best of luck with BLINDSIGHT.

Thanks. I think I'll go kill myself now.

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Interview by Patrick
fantasyhotlist.blogspot