Shadow and Betrayal
crows rose from the branches of dead trees, circled briefly, and took their perches again.
And beyond that, to the east, he saw the distant forms he’d come to see: a sledge with a small team and two figures on it, speeding out across the snowfields. He sat, letting his feet dangle out over the rooftops, and watched until they were only a tiny black mark in the distance. And then as they vanished into the white.
about the author
Daniel Abraham has had stories published in the Vanishing Acts , Bones of the World , and The Dark anthologies, and has been included in Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology as well. His story Flat Diane won the International Horror Guild award for mid-length fiction. He lives in New Mexico with his wife and daughter.
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interview
Were you writing for a long time before you were published? How did it feel to see your first novel in print?
I’ve been writing most of my life. I’d been actively sending out work for publication for about ten years before I started selling short stories, and then another decade between selling my first short story and the first novel coming out. Seeing my first real book in the bookstores was oddly anticlimactic. By the time it came out, I was writing the third book in the series and working on some side projects. Looking back, twenty years of not having a book out required that I find some real, sustaining joy in doing the work for its own sake. The goal was always to be published, but it was never the endpoint.
You’ve written short stories before moving on to novels - is there a difference, apart from length?
There are some structural differences. Stories that can’t be told at shorter lengths become possible as you get longer. And the ones that can be encompassed by five or six thousand words become also become impossible at twenty or a hundred or a quarter million. That said, the immediate issues - how to make the dialogue interesting, how to evoke a location, when to show and when to tell - are pretty similar.
Can you tell us a little bit about the background to The Long Price series?
The Long Price Quartet was a couple of things. First off, it was my journeyman project. I went in having written three previous book-length stories, and aware that I wanted to learn better how to do them. It was also my first real experiment with epic fantasy. I wanted to try a structure that could contrast the epic scale of traditional fantasy with the epic scale of a single, normal lifetime.
Did the idea for The Long Price series come to you fully realised or did you have one particular starting point from which it grew?
It was originally a short story that I thought was complete in itself. When it became clear that the story was going to be much, much bigger, it took some more work. That first story became the prologue of the first book, almost unchanged from its original form.
How extensively do you plot your novels before you start writing them? Do you plot the entire series before you start writing or do you prefer to let the story roam where it will?
I outline along the way, but every outline is provisional. For the whole project, I knew the overall shape I wanted, and what the last scene would be. As I approached each individual story, I’d figure out the ending I was aiming for. It’s sort of like longdistance driving. I knew I was going from Los Angeles to Chicago, so I knew where I was going, but I didn’t plan out each individual turn and stop along the way.
Do you have a set writing routine and if so, what is it?
I have the intention of a set routine. I drop the darling child off at daycare, and head over to a print shop that my parents have behind their house. I spend from about eight thirty to lunchtime working, break for a sandwich, then back for another session until mid aftemoon, when it’s time to retrieve the kid. In practice, the world intrudes. But that’s what I aim for.
Some authors talk of their characters ‘surprising’ them by their actions; is this something that has happened to you, or do you know from the start where each character will end up?
My experience isn’t so much the characters surprising me, as much as I have a good idea of how everything fits together, and I’m o~en a little wrong. I could be wrong about this, but I think the difference is more about how a
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