What sort of influences do you find—not just in fiction and things like that—but, as you do your research, what sort of things influence what you write?
All sorts of things. Quite fascinating, I read a book called Salt , which was an actual history of salt. Fascinating book; a subject that I would not have thought would have been fascinating, but it was interesting enough that I picked up the book and read it in a night and a half, and a salt town appeared in one of the books. It was interesting enough that I said, “I’m going to have this salt town, and this next town you come to is going to be that.”
Isn’t that in book ten?
Yes. Crossroads of Twilight includes a visit to a town where salt is produced. And other things pop in. I needed a way for some characters to get from one place to another sort of stealthily; I wanted them to be able to move without being noticed much. And I just happened to go to a thing called the Circus Flora, which was a recreation of a 19th Century American traveling circus, a small one-ring circus. And I was fascinated by it, and as a result of going to that show, Valan Luca’s traveling show appeared, the original version, which was in effect a small-time circus. It became something much larger later as he earned money and built it up, but in the start, it was a small-time circus with a few acts and a few animals, and it was a way for these characters to be able to move from one place to another because nobody noticed them; they were looking at the show.
I do like it when influences like that make their way in. And can you point to it and say, “Oh, maybe it’s squeezed out of history,” or something like that, or you see something similar in a favorite author, and it’s like, “Oh, that’s very cool to see that sort of thing brought in.”
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