Robin Wayne Bailey is the bestselling fantasy author of books including the Frost and Dragonkin trilogies, Nightwatch, Shadowdance, Night’s Angel, Swords Against The Shadowland, named one of the seven best fantasy novels of 1998 by the Science Fiction Chronicle. A former president of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s of America, his short fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies including Amazing, Fantastic, Science Fiction: The Best of 2001, Far Frontiers, Xmen: Legends, Guardsmen of Tomorrow and the Thieves World project as well as two collections of his own work, Turn Left To Tomorrow and the forthcoming The Fantastikon: Tales Of Wonder both from Yard Dog Press. As editor, he has edited Through My Glasses Darkly, a short story collection by noted author Frank M. Robinson and Architects of Dreams: The SFWA Author Emeritus Anthology. He has hosted Nebula Awards events, helped found the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Hall Of Fame, the Kansas City Science Fiction and Fantasy Society, and the Center For The Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. Robin is a former student and instructor of various martial arts as well as writing and lives in Kansas City with his wife Diana. He can be found online on Facebook, on Twitter as @BaileyRobinW and via his website at http://robinwaynebailey.net/.
SFFWRTCHT: Where’d your interest in SFF come from?
Robin Wayne Bailey: From comic books, probably. My earliest memories involve comic books. My father was a railroad engineer, and the yard office out of which he worked was right next to an old paper mill. In those days, they used to strip comic book covers by tearing off the top one-third of the comic and sending that back to publishers. The rest of the comic book got thrown away. My father would rescue armloads of comics and bring them home. I could read well before kindergarten because of those comic books. To this day, I still love comic books.
SFFWRTCHT: Who were some of your favorite authors and books?
RWB: After reading science fiction and fantasy for half a century, it’s tough to narrow down a short list. Heinlein, of course, and Asimov and Clarke. Also C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, A Merritt, Fritz Leiber, and A. Bertram Chandler, Poul Anderson, Gordon Dickson, C.J. Cherryh and Wilson Tucker. On the fantasy side, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, H. Rider Haggard and James Branch Cabell. Lots of great old pulp writers like Sax Rohmer.
SFFWRTCHT: When did you develop an interest in writing and how did you pursue that? Classes? Workshops? Learn on your own?
RWB: It’s almost a cliché these days to say “All the way back when I was a little kid…” but in my case, it’s true. I’ve always been writing little stories and poems. In the third grade, I wrote a Hiawatha-style poem about Indians. Pardon me, Native Americans. My teacher made me recite it at a parent-teacher assembly. They had such things in those days. Then my parents made me recite it to relatives at a family gathering. I discovered writing could get me attention and let me stand out. I started my first novel in Junior High School, writing in study hall, and had over fifty pages before somebody actually stole it. Teachers were agog that any student would write over fifty pages on anything.
Through high school and college I took every writing course I could. I sold a wide variety of poems back when poetry actually paid, and I sold my first short story during my first freshman semester. It wasn’t genre and it impressed the hell out of my English department. However, the story was published shortly before my father died, and it hurt him very much. That was when I realized the real power of language and writing.
SFFWRTCHT: Were you involved in Cons or CoSplay as a kid?
RWB: I did a lot of theater and dance in high school and college, so I understood costuming. However, I never took part in a convention masquerade until 1976. Kansas City hosted a Star Trek convention and, later, MidAmericon, the world science fiction convention that year. Diana and I cobbled costumes together for the Star Trek convention, and then went all out for the WorldCon, which hosted a stunningly magnificent masquerade that year. I still occasionally take part in masquerades, and I’m often asked to judge them. I enjoy that.
SFFWRTCHT: How long did you write before making your first sale? Did you start with shorts or novels?
RWB: As I mentioned, I sold my first story when I was eighteen during my first semester as a college freshman. It wasn’t genre. I also wrote a lot of poetry and even sold some of it throughout college. For a time after graduate school, I wrote a lot of short stories and made a number of sales to magazines like Amazing and Fantastic. Then the magazines would die or the editors would change before the stories actually saw print. That was frustrating. Alan Dean Foster and I sat on a panel one year at some convention and compared the magazines and editorial careers that we had collectively killed.
SFFWRTCHT: James Gunn claims to have had the same bad timing with magazines a few years before that. Do you usually start with characters or plot?
RWB: It depends. Everything starts with an idea. That idea might turn into a character, or it might generate a plot. However, it all starts with an idea. A writer’s most important skill lies in learning how to develop an idea into an interesting story.
SFFWRTCHT: So, a mad wizard summons the Dark Ones of the Apocalypse and Frost gets charged by a dying angel to guard the Book Of The Last Battle, get to a haunted land named Chondos and there lead an army of sorcerers against an army of demons. To win she has to destroy Heaven and the gods? Sounds pretty simple. Where’d the idea for the Frost Trilogy come from?
RWB: I mentioned the 1976 WorldCon previously. That was a unique and inspiring event in all sorts of ways. Instead of one huge convention banquet, MidAmericon featured three separate banquets, each with a specialized theme and an array of speakers. Diana and I signed up for a banquet that featured a sword-and-sorcery theme and such speakers as Fritz Leiber, L. Sprague DeCamp, and one or two others, along with brand new writer Katherine Kurtz, who had just sold her Dyreni books. I don’t remember precisely who, but one of the speakers decried the lack of strong female characters in the sub-genre. In fact, I could recall only one — C.L. Moore’s character, Jirel of Joiry. I remember grabbing a napkin and scrawling “Frost” on it, and the idea for the first book started coming together from that point. Of course, as is the way of such things, the field suddenly exploded with female fantasy characters. These days, if you held such a banquet, some writer would have to stand up and decry the absence of strong male characters.
SFFWRTCHT: How long does a typical novel take you to write?
RWB: It varies. I wrote my first bestseller, Nightwatch, in just four months. My personal favorite, Shadowdance, took just over a year of actual writing time. I’d say most of my novels take about a year of actual writing time. Planning and development, of course, can add a lot to that. I usually have at least two, and more likely three or four, novels in various stages of development and production. At the moment, I have four.
SFFWRTCHT: How much world building do you do in advance and how much as you go?
RWB: I don’t really think of myself as a world builder. Maybe it’s the theater and dance experience, but I’m more of a “scene-builder.” Before I start writing, I create as much background as it takes to determine the personalities and motivations of my protagonists. Once I get underway, I’ll start adding layers of detail to that, but only if those details are necessary and don’t encumber the story.
SFFWRTCHT: You’ve told me about your world bibles. How do you make one of those?
RWB: Before I begin a novel, I set aside a blank book or a notebook. I’ve got one right here beside the computer as I write these answers. The first chapters of this bible usually include biographies for the major characters, both protagonists and antagonists. These biographies include things like parentage and upbringing, childhood experiences or memories, areas of expertise, where they were born and maybe where they will eventually die. All the kinds of stuff that shape and motivate a character. I’ll also include all the physical details. Another chapter might include all the secondary characters, all the god or deities or other supernatural entities. And still another chapter will include geography – the cities or streets, nations or planets. Any other detail that I think I need to begin the story goes into the bible. And it’s organic — it grows as the writing progresses. It becomes a reference book, and a lot of what goes into it never actually makes it into the novel, itself.
SFFWRTCHT: How much of a blessing is it to have a geologist living with you?
RWB: It’s a mixed blessing. Right now, she’s nagging me to go to dinner while I’m trying to write this. Seriously, Diana’s a big help in a lot of ways. She’s a trained scientist, which is always useful. She’s also something of an expert with herbs and ancient cooking, which is often also useful to me. Not to mention her background in demolitions and environment. The smartest thing a writer can do is surround themselves with experts.
SFFWRTCHT: You also have Shadowdance, a personal favorite, which is dark fantasy. Tell us a bit about that story and how it came about?
RWB: That book came from a very dark place at a particularly dark time in my life. I was struggling with a wide range of life issues: child abuse, molestation, depression and sexual identity, career insecurities, and what I then perceived as an abyss of deep personal failures. I felt smothered in secrets, not just my own, but secrets that other people had put upon me. It all bubbled up into the writing of that book. I’ll never forget my agent calling me up literally in the middle of the night. “This is the book you were born to write,” he said. I don’t know if that was true, but it was certainly the book I had to write at that time, and finishing it felt like an exorcism. It taught me the importance of writing honestly and writing with purpose.
SFFWRTCHT: Around the same period, you did Swords Against The Shadowland, a sequel to Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series? How does one go about taking on such challenge?
SWB: Carefully and with humility. I had met Leiber a handful of times, and he was a sort of God of Fantasy to me. He was tall and gaunt and had such an aura of mystery about him, a kind of charisma, and yet he was approachable and fun. When I decided that I was going to write fantasy, he was one of the writers I studied, and I mean “studied” with all the skills I’d used in graduate school with any other major writer. Leiber and I shared the same agent, and when I was invited to take up the mantel of Lankhmar under Leiber’s guidance, I was stunned. Daunted is perhaps a better word. Unfortunately, Fritz Leiber died before the ink was dry on our contract, so the collaborative experience I’d hoped for wasn’t possible. I didn’t have ego enough to imagine I could tell any story just the way Leiber would tell it, so I taped a note to my brain: honor — don’t imitate. While working in his world with his characters, I still had to bring my own concerns and themes, my own voice, to the work. A lot of people liked the result; some didn’t. That’s life. I’m forever grateful that Leiber trusted me.
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