Cale is my signature character in the Forgotten Realms. The most popular character I've written. He's a thief, an assassin, and eventually, a priest who stabs his own god in the chest. Always trying to slip his past, but never succeeding. Dark dude. Brooding dude. Born killer. But honorable, still.
I like to keep the world, to some degree, an implied setting.
My favorite new character isn't new, but more fleshed out - Gadd, the alekeep at the Tunnel. He's got him some teeth and tats. His history is hinted at in Discourse, and I plan to explore it more in later books.
Original work has no floor and no ceiling. You can reach essentially zero readers or millions.
I enjoyed The Mirage by M. Ruff. I'm reading Edgar Rice Burrough's Princess Of Mars right and loving it.
I loved The Weird (one of the stories in it inspired Blackalley in Discourse).
Shared world has done some world building and brings (in the case of FR and SW) a big audience. With your own work, you're more creatively free. In a way, the shared world stuff has a high floor but a ceiling.
I try to pester Christian Dunn from time to time. As soon as my schedule allows, I plan to make a real pest of myself and get some hot, slippery Chaos action.
The Disney deal created some wrinkles. I'm under contract. But I'm on standby.
I'm unstuck in time. Also, I juggle like mad and have made myself efficient.
Fantasy allows for less rigorous worldbuilding and more vigorous exploration of moral questions. Sci-fi is opp.
The Forgotten Realms is arguable the most detailed, intricate fantasy setting ever created this side of Middle Earth. It's a setting for many D&D game products and lots of fiction. It is vast, historically and geographically and so contains just about anything you might imagine, at one place or time or another. Created by Ed Greenwood. And, for the record, Ed Greenwood is one of the smartest guys I've ever met.
The Sundering is a world spanning event that creates ripples all across the Realms. The books in the series are connected in that they take place against that backdrop, showing different aspects of it. The stories, however, are not sequels or intertwined, though there are some Easter Eggs across books.
My goal is to write stories that are connected, but not sequels in any meaningful sense. Like Howard's Conan tales or Leiber's Fahrrd & the Great Mauser stories.
I always work from outline and almost always write out of sequence. It just works for me.
With young kids (I have four including the newborn) times passes weirdly for me.
[Writing] is harder than you think. You'll be rejected often. If you do it for money, you'll quit. Love it or don't do it.
