What drives your art? What forces you, rides you, hustles you, controls you until its latest needs have been met? What really drives you to create speculative fiction art, be it words or images?

Endorphins and ego. It feels good to write something and know that what you’ve written is good. Better still to sell it — that’s validation. And when people start confusing you with a real writer, well, that’s the best feeling of all. I know it’s supposed to be all about the art, yea? But I’ll leave that to the geniuses.

But when you want to look at it from a purely artistic standpoint the act of discovery, of finding a detail or nuance or direction for your story you didn’t ever suspect was there when you sat down to write, that is a pretty potent and amazing thing. It doesn’t happen with every story, you can’t predict it, but it is strong enough to keep me writing even if no one’s buying and no one seems to care.

If there was the possibility of becoming any speculative fiction character ever created (except your own), would you? Who? Why?

Would I? No. I’m fictional enough already. But if I were to become one I’ll take a minor character somewhere in Iain M. Banks’s Culture universe — a couple of centuries spent in a pleasure-driven, anarchic. Utopia sounds like just what the doctor ordered.

If you could only take one author’s works compressed on an e-book reader on a “one-bag-only” one-way trip to another galaxy, whose works would it be and why?

Shakespeare. Sure, it’s a cliche; but there’s a reason for most cliches. Shakespeare has it all — for anyone in the English-speaking world his work is the foundation.

Why Vendic? What initiated his story and made you complete this particular tale?

Wyrd was one of the earliest ‘on spec’ short stories I wrote, and I was working within a medium I understood — the short, graphic action tale. I had written similar stuff for gamebooks. I don’t think I knew the end before I started, though, that’s one of those serendipitous things that just happens when you let your fingers think for you. So, at the start, it was just this idea to write a short, pithy piece around the idea of ‘fated’ soldiers and the rest rolled in from there.

What ‘rolled in’ was Vendic. That’s one of the great things about writing — once I had a character I had to figure out his motivation, and once I had the motivation I knew the ending. One piece builds upon the next; that’s one of the reasons you don’t have to always know where you are going when you start a piece.

In the privacy of your favorite writing nook, do you act out your protagonist’s actions? Do you know how to use his weapons? Do you wear his clothes? Do you talk like him?

I’m not conducting a private LARP session, if that’s what you’re asking. But yea, I do. You have to know if something is possible, or what something might feel like, or how something sounds. I wouldn’t say I do it with every shout or sword-swing, but I do physicalize things to better understand them. Owning a few swords helps in this regard, as you start to understand a bit more about the heft of weapons, and how they handle.

Quick: List your first thought as your answers to these questions about the future of genre fiction:

Printing Methods: Offset or Print-on-Demand?

I think we’ll eventually see a POD revolution — POD books of decent quality (though probably not exceptional quality) from all the major publishers. Online sales are already huge, and I think a corporate-backed POD program could do things we can’t imagine. How about electronic book kiosks replacing book stores in the mall, a combination billboard and direct-buy interface, where you simply order a POD book on the screen and have it delivered to you? This could further level the playing field for small presses, and create new opportunities for them both from a POD perspective, and for the collectibles market. It could be that one day the big players don’t make high-quality hardbacks (I imagine POD hardbacks being something like book club editions), in which case small press will expand to fill that niche.

Reading Formats: Electronic or Print?

Both. Once the e-reader thing is licked I think we’ll see e-books taking over some segments of the market. But I think people, for the foreseeable future, will still want print. A book is just more convenient than an e-reader and, after staring at a screen all day, a welcome respite from techno-overload.

Book Tours: Physical or Virtual?

Both. Readers like authors, they like to meet them and interact with them. I think virtual tours can grow without taking anything away from physical tours. It’s not a zero sum game.

Reading Habits: Dead, Dying, Alive, Growing?

I believe they are dying and growing at the same time. Conscious, focused reading is dying, vast segments of our society are now operating on a sub-literate level who regard something like an Edgar Allan Poe story as being as opaque as a ballad written in Middle English. The internet and sound-bite culture is eroding the ability to do sustained reading for all of us, even curmudgeonly bookish introverts like myself. However, I think there will always be readers, people who love books no matter their age or whatever distractions for their time they may be confronted with, and the unprecedented access to books, on whatever subject, provided by the internet will mean those people can get a hold of things that, fifteen years ago, would have been impossible.

Length: Flash, Short, Novella, 1970’s novel (60k), 1980’s novel (80k), 1990’s novel (120k), 2000’s novel (150k)

All viable, though the bigger the more bloated, in my experience.

Robert E. Howard, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, Fritz Leiber, Karl Edward Wagner, Louis L’Amour, Frederick Faust, Ian Fleming, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rafael Sabatini . . . the list could go on. Some lived long lives, some flared and burned out young. All lived life hard. All wrote pulse-pounding action-adventure, often dipping into the many different genres they share, yet each eventually establishing their name within a specific one. What do you believe you have in common with these authors, and what makes you so sure speculative fiction – heroic fantasy fiction to be precise – is your genre? Or is it?

I like stories that move. They don’t have to be wall-to-wall with action, but there has to be movement. I’m a pretty impatient reader, and I demand value for my time, and I want to give it to my readers by guaranteeing them I won’t put them to sleep. And the speculative fiction genres are, I think, the only genres left where you can have an entertaining story that also has the ability to resonate thematically and metaphorically with any sort of real, visceral appeal to the reader. Mainstream literature is re-learning that now, they’re busily adopting stale genre tropes in an effort to stop putting their audiences into comas, and they’re calling such work groundbreaking.

Thanks for the great soundbites, Bill!

Bill Ward can be found at billwardwriter.com. Look for links to his fiction, weekly sci-fi, fantasy, and horror book reviews, weekly column at Black Gate, and the latest in genre news from around the web.

Review Praise for “The Wyrd of War”

“…the surprise, for me, was the kick in the stomach I felt at the end, even though I half-expected it. Very well done. It gave me the shudders.” ~ Janice Clark

An excerpt

It was the autumn of the world. On the hard earth of Toth, where the bones of twice ten thousand lay broken and scattered upon the plain, great hosts marched to war. From the north came proud armies beneath banners of rust red and red-gold and the stark white of wasteland snow. Assembled from fenland and mountain dale, city, town, and freehold, the able few of all tribes and nations stood within its ranks. They were the last of their kind upon the lands, the last to stand against the Animus – the living shadow at world’s end.

It had waxed strong, this unseen power, sweeping armies from the field and devouring whole kingdoms in its wars. It had spread across the lands, a blight, enslaving those it did not destroy. Now on this, the last day, the Animus brought forth its force of beasts and bestial men upon the parched earth of the ancient battle-plain, and there made war for the fate of all…

Enjoy this interview and excerpt?
Read more like it from other members of the anthology here on RBE.
Better yet – buy your own copy
of Return of the Sword: An Anthology of Heroic Adventure today!