What other books have you written besides the Wheel of Time series? That’s the one I’m most familiar with.
Well, many years ago, for my sins, I wrote seven Conan novels, ah, novels of Conan the Barbarian. I had been asked to do those because 1) my publisher got the chance to do the Conan novels, 2) the first Conan movie was coming out soon, and he wanted the novel fast, 3) he knew that I had once written a 98,000-word novel in thirteen days—well, it was remarkable, but I already had it all laid out in my head and all the research when I started that one—and I said yes to the one, and had so much fun doing that one that in a weak moment I said yes to six more. You know, they kept the wolf from the door for a few years, and that was good, and I also learned some lessons about writing within constraints. When you’re trying to find something original to do or say in a world that has been created by somebody else, using a character who has been created by somebody else, it’s difficult, and you have to stretch some muscles to be able to do that. I think I actually grew as a writer doing that, by that exercise. I have written…Conan was originally created by Robert Howard in the 1930s. Howard was, as a short story writer, one of the richest men in his West Texas town. When his father died, he promised his father he would take care of his mother. When his mother died, he committed suicide. Now, the reason he committed suicide, frankly, I think was the fact that it was West Texas in the Depression, and I can hardly imagine a bleaker place, and Howard himself firmly believed in reincarnation, and I think he just decided he was going to see what came next.
As for other books I’ve written, let’s see…I ghost-wrote a novel, an international thriller that shall remain nameless. Well, not a bad book, but it is generally believed that somebody else wrote it, so we’ll let it go at that. I wrote what I consider I guess a Western, although it was set in the 1830s and 40s; there was only one major character who was not a Cheyenne Indian. It has been reissued—five or six years ago, I think it was—in hardcover as a novel of the Western experience, and it was received quite nicely. And I wrote three historical novels, the first set during the American Revolution, following the same family. I had intended to do a Southern arc of history. The general arc of history that is studied in the United States and recognized is the move out of New England—Pennsylvania and New York—into the Ohio valley, and from there west to California, but there was a southern arc, which was the move out of Virginia and the Carolinas into Louisiana and Mississippi, and from there into Texas, and from there through New Mexico and Arizona into California. And I wanted to follow that in a series of novels that I originally intended to go from the American Revolution through the Vietnam War, but I’ll tell you the truth…I got tired of them. They were doing nicely, but I just got tired of them and said, “I want to do something else.”
I can sympathize. Some day I hope somebody does something very similar that also tracks the settlers as they came through Knox Landing, along with the Scottish/Irish settlers up there in northern Alabama, because you had of course Mobile, three hundred years old in the south, in southern Alabama [?].
I had gotten as far as the late 1820s or early 1830s and the family I was tracing, I’d reached as far as Texas, and you could see revolution on the horizon, but it had not arrived yet.
[?] That sounds wonderful, and if you ever get inspired to write that again, that would be great.
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