No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly.
I had novels to write, so I wrote them.
What I'm working on now - I'm back to fantasy, although considering that it's me, I'm turning it into a kind of science fantasy. It's a vampire story - but my vampires are biological vampires. They didn't become vampires because someone bit them; they were born that way.
Here I was into astronomy, and here into anthropology, and there I go into geology. It was much more fun to be able to research and write about whatever I wanted to.
Hollywood wants to go for the flash, because that's what a lot of them think science fiction is.
The thing about science fiction is that it's totally wide open. But it's wide open in a conditional way.
I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time.
Science fiction is not formulaic.
Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.
While Fledging is a different type of book, The Parable series serve as cautionary tales. I wrote the Parable books because of the direction of the country. You can call it save the world fiction, but it clearly doesn't save anything.
But my problem with fantasy, and horror, and related genres, is that sometimes the problems are illogical.
I would never have been a good scientist - my attention span was too short for that.
Once you grow past Mommy and Daddy coming running when you're hurt, you're really on your own. You're alone, and there's no one to help you.
No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest.
On the other hand, I was very much interested in the way people behaved, the human dance, how they seemed to move around each other. I wanted to play around with that.
So fantasy was fine early on, and when I discovered science fiction, I was very happy with it, because my first interest in science fiction came with an interest in astronomy.
And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write - every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing.
I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.
Most of us don't have to worry about being shot if we poke our noses outside. So we are comfortable, but the people I'm writing about are definitely not comfortable, and being shot while they're still inside is a good possibility.
Third, for people who aren't doing it already, take classes - they're worthwhile. Workshops or classes - a workshop is where you do actually get feedback on your work, not just something where you go and sit for a day.
