Writer

A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you're communicating what you think you're communicating. It's so easy as a young writer to think you're been very clear when in fact you haven't.

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.

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.

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.

People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.

But my problem with fantasy, and horror, and related genres, is that sometimes the problems are illogical.

Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.

I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.

When I was 7 and went to the zoo with my second-grade class, I saw chimpanzee eyes for the first time - the eyes of an unhappy animal, all alone, locked in a bare, concrete-floored, iron-barred cage in one of the nastier, old-fashioned zoos. I remember looking at the chimp, then looking away.

Science fiction frees you to go anyplace and examine anything.

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.

We are a naturally hierarchical species.

Religion kept some of my relatives alive, because it was all they had. If they hadn't had some hope of heaven, some companionship in Jesus, they probably would have committed suicide, their lives were so hellish.

Too many writers get into that gross-'em-out factor.

I was raised Baptist, and I like the fact that I got my conscience installed early.

Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.

I'm comfortably asocial - a hermit in the middle of a large city, a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty and drive.

And by the way, I wanted to point out that Kindred is not science fiction. You'll note there's no science in it. It's a kind of grim fantasy.

Movies are extremely imitative of one another. Whatever works, people will try to do it.

I learned that five- and-six-year-old kids have already figured out how to be intolerant.