You’ve been very active on Facebook or on your blog, and this for a long time. How important are these new technologies for you?
I feel they’re extremely important for me. We’re entering an interesting age for art, because there are impressive levels of communications between artist and patron. And I really do look at my readers as my patrons. If you go back to the 19th century, for an artist to create great art, they would usually have to have a wealthy nobleman who was funding them to be able to do it. And these days, it actually works the same way in my mind, except the wealthy lord who’s funding me is actually all the crowd, the fandom.
We, in science fiction and fantasy, are a very tight-knit community, and I find that fans of science fiction and fantasy tend to be very different from like movie star fans who go crazy or things like that. Science fiction and fantasy fans are part of the conversation: they come up to you, and they can converse; it’s like they’re colleagues. And out of this entire group, they say to me: “Okay, you go create art for our entire community. We’ll support you in it, as part of our community.” And I really feel a debt to my readers, for allowing me the opportunity to do what I do for a living. And so my best way to respond to that, I feel, is to be very open and to have a lot of communication. A lot of fans get frustrated because they don’t know when the books are coming out, and I like to have updates and let people know—daily updates. I belong to them in a lot of ways, so they deserve to see what I’m doing, with the opportunity they’ve given me.
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