How have things changed since you submitted Elantris to Tor?
For one thing, I’m a full-time writer, which is just wonderful. It’s what I’ve always dreamed of doing, and now I actually, I have time to work on projects and on side-projects: I get to do this full-time. Beyond that, I get to be part of the community. The science fiction and fantasy community is amazing. Everyone is so helpful, all the other writers: I’m just amazed at how kind they are, how willing to help out the newbie.
My life has changed drastically. There are people who know me that I’ve never met; there are a lot of them. I get dozens of emails from them every week. I feel a strange sense of responsibility, honestly, to the community now because the relationship between writer and reader is an interesting one. It’s a participatory art. Whatever I write on the page, it doesn’t come alive until the reader reads it and imagines it. The book becomes theirs at that point; the characters become who they imagine them to be.
I feel a responsibility to the people who are reading the books and supporting me. Maybe in the same way that, in the olden days, you would have the performer who would be on the streets getting paid just by the kindness of those passing along the way, in fact you still see that quite a bit. I feel like I’m the same way. I’m employed, I make a living, and I get to do these wonderful things, come up with these stories and work on them because of the readers’ willingness to support me. That means that I feel that I need to produce the best stories that I can for them, not just dust off an old book that I wrote ten years ago, but always be giving them my best work. It’s a strange sense of just weight of responsibility to make sure that I am producing things that people are enjoying.
I’m always doing my best work. That’s different. I used to just write for myself, now I write for everyone who enjoys my books.
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