When Joseph Conrad finished Nostromo, he sent a telegram to a friend saying "I feel I ought to be congratulated, as one who has recovered from a long and debilitating illness." When I finished Blade of Tyshalle, the email I sent to my family and friends read "DONE, BY CHRIST! Don't bother calling for the next two or three weeks. I'll be asleep."

Maybe I should have thrown in an absent-minded wizard, or a wisecracking dragon... Too often, comic relief is an author's way of telegraphing to the audience, "Hey, just kidding. It's only a show, folks."

Well, guess what? I'm not kidding.

Which is not to say there are no smiles in the book -- they're just the hard kind, the ones people share when they're fighting for their lives. Hesse put it well in Steppenwolf: "All humor is gallows humor, and it is on the gallows that we are constrained to learn it."

Me.

I'm just that arrogant, I guess. I am my own ideal audience. I've said it before: I write the kind of books I like to read. If lots of other people were writing books like mine, I wouldn't bother; I'd just read theirs. Reading is a lot less work.

So, yeah. When I start to wander in a story -- I fall into that "can't see the forest for the trees" trap pretty regularly -- the way I find my way back is to ask myself what would work for me as a reader. What would I be itching for? Then I try to find a way to scratch that itch in a way that's satisfying not only viscerally, but emotionally and intellectually -- and would leave me itching for more.

Writing it wasn't depressing at all. Just the opposite. Sure, everybody suffers -- just like in our world. But the book isn't about their suffering; it's about why they suffer, and what they do about it.

One of the primary themes of 20th Century literature has been the way the world -- society, reality, what you will -- inevitably erodes our hopes and dreams; there is volume after volume about the death of everything that's fun about being human. There has been a time when a story could not be considered serious literature unless its protagonist is crushed by the futility of existence -- the existential void -- figuratively, if not literally.

I say, screw that.

Suffering is the fuel in the engine that drives the world. All progress is the result of somebody being unhappy -- then making a move to change whatever it is that's dragging them down. Suffering is not depressing in itself; what's depressing is helplessness. What's depressing is giving up. That's why writing the book wasn't depressing: because when these people hurt, they do something about it.

For me, that's the opposite of depressing; it's what keeps me alive.

There will always be people who want to knock your corners off so you can fit more neatly into their pigeonholes.

And a lot of them, it seems, write book reviews...

Non-conformists are still mental slaves to the society they reject; they still use the rules of that society to define themselves, but negatively. They even have a uniform -- I should say, uniforms, depending on the Non-Conformist Flavor of the Month.

Pretty much all my life I've just gone ahead and done whatever I thought was the right thing to do. It's not that I don't care what other people think; of course I do. It's just that I don't let it stop me.

I don't set out to write non-conformist books, either. I just try to write honest ones. At the end of the day, what I do best is still pretty old-fashioned: they used to call it swords & sorcery. I just think -- I really, truly, profoundly believe -- that swords & sorcery (fantasy, SF, whatever) ought to be more than junk food.

If that makes me a non-conformist, then modern fantasy and SF are in a shitload of trouble.

Fritz Leiber wrote a novel called The Silver Eggheads, in which the narrator/hero is a celebrated author of "wordwooze" -- which is a literary narcotic produced by machine, churned out in endlessly thick-volumed series, offering readers little soporific vacations from their real lives -- and making sure they'll buy the next installment. Leiber intended it as a satire on publishing, but his satire has become the truth. Our bookstores are full of wordwooze. Every genre, not just SF&F. You can't get away from the stuff.

Yeesh. I hate that crap.

Maybe someday reviewers with real expertise in SF&F will start applying serious critical standards -- and writing about them with eloquence and passion -- rather than just cheerleading books that happen to amuse them, or that they expect will become successful. But any such transformation has to start from inside: we need to be producing more books that merit serious criticism before we can expect to get any.

I guess what I'd really like to see is less reviewers, more critics. After all, most reviews are really just book reports, wrapped up with a sentence or two on why you should or shouldn't spend your money on this book. Maybe what we really need is someone eloquent enough to explain to all the Wall Street Journal types why they should be paying attention to SF&F. It takes great criticism to direct the world's attention to the 5 or 10 percent of our genre (or any genre) that's actually worth reading.

I had people ask me about Heroes Die: "I'm not sure how I'm supposed to feel about Ma'elKoth. Is he a bad guy, or a good guy, or what? Am I supposed to like him or hate him?" My general answer: "You're not supposed to feel anything but whatever it is you feel. Make up your own damn mind."

Even Caine himself: his activities and attitudes in Heroes Die made a lot of people -- mostly reviewers -- uncomfortable. Many of them were disturbed to find themselves rooting for this ruthless, amoral murderer; they were even more disturbed by the lack of moralizing from the author. Some of them even invented a "moral progression" for Caine, to excuse themselves for liking him.

But I'm not a moralist. Just the opposite. My goal is to present a story as honestly as I can; what you think of it, and how it makes you feel, is your business. I'll tell you what the characters think, and how they feel, but the rest is up to you. My hope is that some readers will take the time to read these books more than once. They might find that these stories hit them differently, a few years from now. The meaning of any work of art depends on who you are when you look at it.

On the subject of fate in Blade of Tyshalle, I'm going to hide behind a quote from Nietzsche: "There is no such thing as free will. There is also no such thing as unfree will. There is only strong will, and weak will."

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