Hello, Quinn: many thanks for giving us some time here. Welcome to SFFWorld. We’re writing these questions as Open Road Media are releasing more of your older work as e-books.
Of the current list now being released (The Godforsaken, Beastnights, Firecode, Sins of Omission, Hyacinths and Time of the Fourth Horesman) have you got any particular personal favourites in that list?
My favorite book is always the next one, but that means that at one time or another, each of those books — as well as all the rest — was my favorite.
During the last few years you’ve had several of your older books released as e-books. How comfortable are you generally with seeing the re-appearance of older work?
I’ve said for a couple of decades now that the saving of the midlist would be epublishing, and I still believe it. Fortunately, that seems to be happening. I’m always glad when my work is available and I get paid for its sale.
You wrote about vampires long before the wave of Twilight and True Blood started. Actually your Saint-Germain series is now the longest vampire series ever. Do you feel like a pioneer?
I don’t know whether I do or not. I do know I started out intending to push the vampire archetype as far to the positive as possible and still have a recognizable vampire, and then I used that form of the vampire to write about the lives of women in various times in history, and in various cultures.
The first book in the Saint-German series was published in 1978. How do you manage to keep track of everything over such a long time span? If you had the chance, is there anything you’d want to go back and change?
Early on in the series, I made a chronology for the events in Saint-Germain’s “life”, not only in the books already written, but references to characters and events that had not yet been explored. When I started, it was four pages long — now it’s more than twenty. I update it with every book and story, otherwise I’d be confused and bewildered. I really don’t think I’d want to change anything due to the ripple in the pond effect. If I shift story elements in, say Blood Games, they could have unexpected ramifications in all the stories and novels that come afterward. Good, bad, or indifferent, I trust them the way they are.
Why the fascination with vampires?
Blame Stoker on one hand, and a semester of teaching Unitarian Sunday school to third graders (long story — I won’t bore you). The kids all seemed to like vampires, and I, who liked them, too, wanted to work with that idea. I’d tried to write Dracular style vamps in my teen-aged years and couldn’t get the hang of it, but watching some of the boys doing their best with capes and baring teeth, I found another perspective on the archetype.
Thinking back, how did you start writing? Was there a particular book or moment in your life that spurred you on?
When I was six years old, I learned there was a job called writer, and I knew that it was meant for me. I’d been reading since age four, and so I decided I’d take a flyer at storytelling. I wrote a “book” that year, it was quite short — twelve or fourteen handwritten pages, as I recall — and the single copy was on five and a half by eight and a half lined sheets. I was hooked, and still am.
You also write shorter fiction. How different do you find writing short stories and shorter fiction rather than novels? Do you have a preference?
For me, short fiction is about a single event and novels are about intertwined events, which is why short stories are so hard to write — everything has to be pared down to essentials. Since I’m a character-driven writer, I like to have more words to explore relationships and nuance that can’t be addressed in short stories. But there are stories that are confined to a single instant, and that’s when I do shorter work.
Your writing spans many genres, which do you enjoy the most to write?
When it comes to fun — which doesn’t mean easy, but enjoyable — I like Westerns best. Oakledge Press has reissued my first Western, The Law in Charity, last month, and we’re hoping to get the rights back to the second book in the series. Last year I wrote another book about Charity, ten years after the first two. I was lucky enough to have an associate who loaned me his great-great-grandfather’s journal, which included an account of the visit of a European nobleman to a small Kansas town in 1857, which I used as a source for many of the events for The Changes in Charity. Charity is a small town in the Colorado Rockies, but the issues are similar even if the contours are different. Over the years I’ve done a lot of genre-straddling — Saint-Germain is certainly one example of that. I find it keeps my work fresh, or at least it seems that way to me.
You also have to tell us a bit about the fact that you often draft your own maps for your books. How do you go about doing that, and do you make revisions as you go?
Our family business was cartography, and I worked for my dad for seven years, between the time I left college and I started selling fiction. I find it useful to know where I am in a story. Most of the time I’m dealing with actual places (Florence, Italy; Asia; western Europe; etc.) and seek out as much material contemporary to the setting of the story as I can find and then I get out my ruled drafting paper and drafting pens and go to work. On those rare occasions when I’m dealing with imaginary places, I work out the geography and the environment, and then lay out the places of the story. The map in A Feast in Exile is probably the best of the lot so far.
How much of your inspiration do you draw from real history?
It depends on the book, or the story. A great deal of my work is solidly based in real history, but I also like alternate histories: Ariosto is probably my best example of that. The Godforsaken is alternate history as well. I have a trilogy I’d like to find a home for one of these days, an alternate history trilogy covering five hundred years of much changed Roman history dealing with the development of steam power, extrapolated from their actual (in our own timeline) use of hydrolic technology. The Saint-Germain books are rigorously accurate about history. And the mystery (I hope) series I’m working on at present is carefully true to Philadelphia in 1924, except for the ghost.
You have also written under several other pen names. What do you feel are the main benefits for an author to sometimes use pseudonyms?
Sometimes it is a contractual situation: the collaboration I’ve had with Bill Fawcett as Quinn Fawcett was required by the publisher, because it was Well Known at that time that identified collaborations don’t sell. Trystam Kith, which I used on the two Trouble in the Forest books, was to keep from creating confusion with the Saint-Germain books. The two Kith books are historical horror, and about vampires, but there the similarities end. TCFHopkins’ two books, being popular military nonfiction, was a way to avoid the assumption that either of those two books were fiction. Camille Gabor, which I used for some high-fantasy stories, was one of those contractual situations.
How are you personally finding the e-book revolution?
Hidden Knowledge published my first e-book, Magnificat, fifteen years ago, and I was delighted then, and continue to be delighted now. I do have reservations about securing copyrights in this Wild West environment, but at least now there are some effective legal solutions in place to address issues of piracy.
You have been named a Living Legend by the International Horror Guild and a Grand Master at the World Horror Convention. What is it that still keeps you writing, today? Have you now got to the point where you can happily walk away, feeling that ‘the job is done’?
There is no inspiration like unpaid bills to keep me at the machine. That, and I promised myself when I was six that before I died, I would publish one hundred books. At present, I’m working on number 94, and I hope to get to 100 in the next two or three years.
Like many writers, I’m compulsive, and I doubt I could just walk away from it. But we’ll see.
Which lead us to the “what’s next” question? What projects are you working on at the moment?
At present, I’m working on the second Chesterton Holte: gentleman haunt book, Living Spectres. The first, Haunting Investigation in due out in a few months from Cleveland Writers Press. And I’m working on Saint-Germain #28, Orphans of Memory (I love that title), which takes place in the Khazar Empire in 814-815 AD. We’ll see how things go after that. I have no lack of possibilities, but finding the markets will determine which way I go next.
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Interview by Dag Rambraut – SFFWorld.com © 2015
