PIERS ANTHONY

Have a working spouse, because you won't earn a living from writing - not at first, if ever. My wife worked for years to support us.

That most dangerous of opponents: the one who took pains to comprehend the position of his adversary.

I maintain an ongoing survey of Internet Publishing and self publishing, so that it is now possible for any writer with a book to get it published at nominal cost or free, and to have it on sale at booksellers like Amazon.com.

At the time I wrote Xone I had never been on the Internet.

Keep writing, because not only does practice improve skill, it gives you more chances to score on the market. I did that for eight years before making my first sale.

Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series also shows the potential of lighter fantastic fiction. I read the first, and listened to a tape of a later one, and it's fun.

I don't want ever to be guilty of what my critics claim: doing formula without original elements.

I do one Xanth novel a year, because at the moment that is all that publishers will accept; they don't want any other type of fiction from me, so Xanth pays my way.

When one person makes an accusation, check to be sure he himself is not the guilty one. Sometimes it is those whose case is weak who make the most clamour.

I wish my readers took less of my time - about a third of my working time goes to them - but I love and need them all.

No novel is a clone of any preceding one, though with a background cast of characters and things that has grown to thousands, there are many familiar aspects.

It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.

In fact, I believe that we need better sex education in our own culture, here in America, so that young folk learn about things like venereal disease before they encounter it.

What I like least is dealing with publishers who simply don't want collaborations regardless of their merit.

One reason I don't suffer Writer's Block is that I don't wait on the muse, I summon it at need.

SF is the literature of the theoretically possible, and F is the literature of the impossible.

As for collaboration - I have done a lot, 26 books, and found publishers increasingly resistive to them. It's not that the books are bad; editors won't even read them.

I did not know at first that it would be a series; I discovered after the first novel that I had more to say about it, so I did another. And another, and then the readers demanded yet more.

I hope to read a Harry Potter novel soon, to see what it's all about. I admit to being annoyed that many good light fantasy writers have had trouble getting published, in England and elsewhere, when it is obvious the readers were waiting for us all along.

Normally I work out a general summary of what I mean to do, then start writing, and the details can be different from my anticipation. So there is considerable flow, but always within channels.

All things make sense; you just have to fathom how they make sense.

But I don't read or listen for pleasure. I have too much else to do.

I never do a full outline, and if I did, I would not feel bound to it, because the view from inside a scene can be different from the view outside it. But neither do I just start writing and see what happens; I am far more disciplined than that.

Princess Rose should indeed be a TV movie, assuming something doesn't go wrong. I don't know how good a movie it will be, because the way movie folk think is different from the way writers think, and I distrust what isn't done my way. This is what I call a healthy paranoia.

At present I answer about 100 letters a month, and read 300 emails.