Elbakin.net

In her review of Gardens of the Moon, J.V. Jones suggested that, although she liked the book, it was not an easy read. Do you feel that's a fair criticism, or do you think that readers have had enough brain candy and now should be, or should want to be, challenged in their fantasy reading? 'Not an easy read.' Yeah, true enough. Sure it's a fair criticism. A lot of Gardens was a dismantling of various conventions of the genre. I'm not a fan of blindingly Good heroes versus insipidly stupid Evil bad-guys. The notion of evil for its own sake strikes me as boring -- all these Dark Lords intent on creating wastelands packed with enslaved victims... for what? Granted, the tradition asserts an archetypal juxtaposition and so illuminates the human condition -- I'll swallow that, and even acknowledge that as the source of the genre's universal appeal. But my personal fascination as a writer is with ambivalence and ambiguity. My anthropological back gets raised hackles with simple worlds and simple conflicts. Nothing's simple. Nothing ever was. So Gardens involved a twisting of loyalties, hopefully offering to the reader the choice of to whom to pledge allegiance. Good guys do bad things and bad guys do good things and sometimes things that look good are actually bad. With luck every character comes across as genuine in their uncertainties... Also, I wanted, with Gardens, a sense that we (as readers) are just stepping into a fully realized history -- we're taking a peek at a slice of events. Some of the criticisms I've read regards landing at a run or floundering for footing at the start are ones I humbly accept. Then a secret part of me rails that if I wanted to write of the Roman Empire do I need to start with the Etruscans? The Greeks? Cro-Magnon Man? Basically, I had to start somewhere. For all the seriousness of the above, I was simply having fun writing Gardens. All the twists, the duelling perspectives, reversals -- with the character of Kruppe doing my dirty work, subversive-wise. Funny how the most easily written work I've ever done turned out to be the most challenging for readers. Got no explanation for that, I'm afraid. Now that you've created such a vividly detailed world, and committed to writing a total of 10 books to take place in it, have you already mapped out the direction you want to go? Or is it the case that one book, only once completed, will lead you logically to the next? I've a pretty good idea of the series arcs leading up to and including the 10th novel, but I'm trying to retain a flexibility for each novel's distinct plot-lines. I suspect if I'd mapped things out down to the last detail the pleasure of writing would vanish. I crave the spontaneity.