I want to be judged harshly because that forces me to really sit down and focus.
If you're Stephen King and you have a massive body of huge-selling well-respected work, you can pivot and do whatever you want. I don't have that body of work, I don't have that audience that's comfortable with me enough yet to follow my bliss with me.
If you write really good material, the rest just falls into place. There's really no trick to it.
It's absurd to think of 'Pride and Prejudice,' this classic, beloved book, beset with a zombie uprising. The goal is to make you suspend your disbelief enough to allow you to get lost in the story and believe what you're reading for a while.
I always say that the characters in Jane Austen's original books are rather like zombies because they live in this bubble of immense wealth and privilege and no matter what's going on around them they have a singular purpose to maintain their rank and to impress others.
There are so many stories to tell in the worlds of science fiction, the worlds of fantasy and horror that to confine yourself to even doing historical revisionist fiction, whatever you want to call it - mash-ups, gimmick lit, absurdist fiction - I don't know if I want to do that anymore.
But if you read Jane Austen, you know that she had a wicked sense of humor. Not only was she funny, but her early writing was very dark and had a gothic tone to it.
My day job is making TV shows.
