[Obsidian Entertainment] Под беззвёздными небесами. Глава девятая: Царствие игровое — о «Забытых королевствах» устами создателей (Часть вторая)

I try to read the first book of a major series, but it's so hard," Salvatore explained as I sat down to dinner with Mr. Drizzt Do'Urden himself, his wife Diane, and my fiancé. "I'm writing 12 months a year at this time, and even when I say I'm not going to write, I am."

"If I'm reading ... other fantasy books, they creep into my work, and I can't have that." He pauses, smiles, and then adds, "I'm planning on re-reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when I'm done with my current book tour."

"I'm not nearly as disciplined as I was because the kids aren't around anymore. My schedule used to go with the kids'. We'd [Salvatore and his wife] get them up and off to school, we'd have a cup of coffee, then I'd write until I had to go to their hockey game or whatever in the afternoon. But now, I'm finding that, for health reasons, so I don't get consumed by the business, I have to get on a schedule so the writing doesn't consume me."

"I don't set aside time to read," Salvatore said, "but I read a lot on the Internet, I read political books, magazines, but I don't read as much fiction as I used to because, again, it seeps into my writing."

"as a writer, you can't be a reader without also being an editor. I can't just read something someone's given me without thinking, 'This is what I would have done instead.' It just ruins books for me. The times when I do read are times when I'm giving a quote on a book."

"With a long running series," Salvatore says, "people have their own interests in those characters, [and] they take propriety over that series. They're thinking, 'What are you doing, messing with MY friends?'"

"The characters will follow the course I tell them to, and they will change to fit the way I'm feeling," Salvatore says. "Whether it's Drizzt, or the Highway Man... those characters are saying what I want them to, I'm in control of them. There are things I can accomplish in a Drizzt book, and there are things I can accomplish in a Demon Wars book, and I know that the parameters, the boundaries, for each."

"Absolutely," Salvatore says. "With Drizzt, it's been 20 years. As long as I'm having fun with the characters, and as long as people want to read it, and as long as the publisher wants me to write it, I'll keep writing it. So far, all of those criterion have been met. I do it because I love it, I love the characters. I do it because I found a voice through those characters."

"I'm blasting through the second book [The Pirate King] right now, on airplanes across the country as I travel for my current book tour [for The Orc King]. It's about a quarter of the way done already, in terms of actual word count, but I've got the book plotted from beginning to end. I expect to be turning it in around the first of the year."

"When I say 'plotted out,' I mean that in general terms," Salvatore explains. "The characters are surprising me at every turn. I know the first act, the second act, and the third act; I know the beginning, the middle, and the end—but the end might change, and that's okay. Because all of that's already there, the hardest parts of the book to write are the beginning and the end when you know where you're going."

"I was with Del Rey for the [DemonWars] seven book series," Salvatore says. "In the mid ‘90s, when I broke apart from TSR for a while, Owen Lock over at Del Rey contacted me and said, 'We want you to come over here and take as much time as you need to write the best book you can write.' That was music to my ears. I got to actually sit down and take all these ideas that had been bouncing around in my head since I'd first decided that I wanted to write a fantasy book, only now, I had the skills to actually do it—I think. And that world, which is my Forgotten Realms, my Middle-earth, my Shannara—that world is Corona."

"Betsy Mitchell took over. There were several publishers there, but Betsy had come from Warner, and she had published my Crimson Shadow books [over at Warner]. I thought I was done. I was planning to go back, but then tried to slow down. I had too many books to write, and I thought I wanted a break. Of course, as soon as I slowed down, I started to go faster. An opportunity came up when Bertelsmann bought Random House, and they sold off one of their warehouses to Gilbert Pronman, and I knew Gilbert very well because he'd been running the Random House Juvenile Merchandise division, the division who used to distribute TSR."

Gilbert, Salvatore elaborated, "wanted me to come over and write a book for him at this company he started, called CDS. It was a distribution company, but they wanted to do some publishing. They were really trying to change the entire structure of the way authors make money writing books. I'd seen the world change, and I thought that was an important step to try. And, I love working with Gilbert, anyway. So I went over and did The Highwayman, which was originally for CDS books."

"CDS got bought by Perseus, Gilbert left, and everyone else I was working with, they left," Salvatore said. "So I thought, 'Well, I'm done. I'll just go do my Drizzt books,' and then Tom Doherty called me. I talked to CDS and Perseus, and they granted me back the rights to Highwayman, so I'm writing The Ancient, with the same lead character, and that will be out in March, and I'm going on from there."

"Tom, when he called me, he said, 'I really like your books, and I want you working for me.' I thought, 'Oh, here we go,' because everyone always says that. They never read your books, they just say they read your books. But Tom, he came up to Boston, and when he was discussing what he liked about my books, I realized that he ... got what I do."

"I love working with Tor because I'm working with a publisher who doesn't have to answer to bureaucracy. Tom Doherty makes a decision, and that's the decision, and I love that. He's a reasonable guy, he's sharp, and he's proven that, time and time again. Robert Jordan? Tor. Terry Goodkind? Tor. When he [Tom Doherty] talks, you listen if you're smart. It's been a pleasure working with him, and I'm so happy to be back in the world of Corona, that I created with DemonWars."

"I have the space to move around," Salvatore confirmed. "They'll find a space for me to hide if I need to hide from what's going on elsewhere, but that's not even it. From the beginning of becoming a writer, I've had this vision of a fantasy world that I wanted [to create]. I did a little of it with the Crimson Shadow books that I wrote for Warner, but I had had the time to really develop the world that I wanted."

"It's nothing against Del Rey," Salvatore says. "I still have some dear friends there. Betsy [Mitchell] and I have known each other for, what, it's gotta be 18 years now? It's funny, because [my wife Diane and I] went to ComicCon last year in San Diego. We were there with Wizards [of the Coast], but when we got to my hotel room, some friends from Del Rey were there, and I ended up having dinner with the guys from Del Rey almost every night. I still love everybody there."

"I really wanted to work with Tom Doherty before he decides, "Enough is enough," and retires. He's one of the giants in the science fiction and fantasy fields, someone I'd never worked with. And, it [going to Tor] gave me the opportunity to work with Mary Kirchoff again. Mary's my dear friend, the one who pulled me out of the slush pile [in 1987], so what can I say? I really wanted to work with Tor, and with Tom. And he came to me. That was the biggest thing. I mean, Tom Doherty asking me to come work with him—I don't take that lightly. This guy's been around the business since the 50s, and... I'm happy with him."

"I'm not saying I wouldn't go back to Del Rey. There was no falling out or anything like that."

"I've been really lucky in that, in all my years of working, I've only had one situation that wasn't great in this business."

"I'd get letters saying, 'I'm glad you killed Wulfgar. That took guts, don't you dare bring him back.' Others would say, 'Wulfgar was my favorite character, you'd better bring him back!' I was like, 'Oh boy, what'd I do here?' I was on the fence for a long time about [killing the character]. Again, while I'm writing these books, the characters surprise me, page after page. With Wulfgar, I was never quite sure whether he'd ever re-appear, or if he was dead and gone. I knew that they [TSR] were going to get someone else to write dark elf books, and I knew that if I didn't bring him back, someone else ... would. So, sense I was on the fence anyway, I decided that, in the last book I wrote, I would bring Wulfgar back, and I'd give Bruenor back his eye, and I'd make everything nice and neat so no one else could come in and tamper with things."

"I wouldn't have done it, even if someone else would've come along and brought Wulfgar back, if I wouldn't have been so on the fence about doing it in the first place. Three years later, because there was still something nagging at me, something saying, "Maybe he's not dead," that was kind of like flipping the coin. When I wrote Passage to Dawn, I knew in my heart and soul that that would be the last book I would write for TSR. After Wizards bought TSR, I got a call saying they wanted me back—but I told them no. I said, If anyone else writes those books, I won't touch the characters ever again; they're dead to me.'"

"I'm really glad I brought Wulfgar back. When I was writing Spine of the World, I came to appreciate making something of what Wulfgar had gone through. When I wrote that book, I sent it to my editor and I said, 'Half the people are going to love this book, and the other half are going to hate it. It is what it is, and there's nothing I can do about it.'"

"They're not just words to you as a writer," Salvatore says, "just like they're not just words to readers. When I wrote Mortalis [the fourth book of DemonWars], it was during the darkest time of my life. I was watching my best friend, my brother, die of cancer while I was writing that book. I have a character in that book, who was very minor, and all the sudden it hits me about three-quarters through the book: this character has really taken over. I've given him as complete a story as I've ever written about any character in my life. I've absolutely fallen for the guy as a character, and it hurt like hell to kill him."

"I pull a lot of fast ones to make readers think a character is dead when they're not. That's part of the drama, bringing them to the edge of destruction, of despair, but I've never miraculously reversed anything. Even with Wulfgar, I left myself an out from the beginning, because I wasn't sure. Did he die, or was he taken away? I'd already sent the precedent that certain extra planar creatures can take other creatures their plan, just as Guenhwyvar did with Regis in The Crystal Shard."

"Characters have died in the books, and characters will continue to die in the books, but that doesn't mean I have to get bloodthirsty. If you read my DemonWars books ... you have to be careful if you get too attached; people are gone all the time. With the Drizzt books, I don't think the readers really want someone to die. Although, if the story in a Drizzt book dictates that somebody has to go, then somebody has to go—permanently. Nobody's off limits."

"When I signed up to do Vector Prime, I'd wanted to work with Shelley Shapiro, the editor, for a long time. She's a celebrated editor, and for good reason: she's a fantastic person, and a fantastic friend. She called me in August of '98 and asked me if I could come in and do a book for them, and they needed it done fast. I agreed to do it, but called Wizards of the Coast first and said, 'Look, they want me to do this Star Wars book, so I'm going to need an extension on the [next] Drizzt book.' Wizards agreed, saying, 'We think it'll be great for you. It's Star Wars, so have a blast.'

"I signed the contract, got the advance check, put it in the bank. They'd given me what they wanted, showing me the A to Z story arc for the New Jedi Order series, and they told me, 'Take this from A to B.' I got to work putting together this story, and I had to involve a cast of millions, all the characters from the movies, everyone from the main books. I came up with the story, and I had to give them a victory, and introduce a new enemy being developed for the New Jedi Order.

"I put everything together and sent them my outline. I was on a conference call with Lucasfilm and Del Rey, and they said, 'Wow, we really like this, we think you definitely get it—but didn't anybody tell you?'

"I said, 'Tell me what?'

"They said, 'Well, you have to kill Chewbacca.'

"I said, 'Whoa, where can I return the check?' They convinced me that they were doing it for the right reasons, and the convinced me that they were doing this to show the Star Wars fans that they were serious. So, I did it. I gave them a death worthy of Chewbacca, but in retrospect, if I could take anything back in my writing career, that would be it. Not because of all the death threats, but because to this day, I'm still not sure if we should have done that."

"We're making a MMORPG [Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game]," Salvatore confides, "and we're talking about a process that's going to take us three or four years. Right now, we're really focusing on a sort of pre-production phase. I believe that when you're creating a world for people to exist in, the consistency, the logic, the "sameness"—everything has to make sense in the world."

"You have all these different races populating different cultures in the world, and their relationships have to make sense. You can't just say, 'Well, what happens if this king hates this king? Let's write a quest about that!' You want to look deeper than that so the quests will naturally evolve from the world's history. The pre-production phase of building this world is creating this rich history from what we know we have in the world. I don't know what we're going to use for middleware, if we're even going to have middleware; what we're going to use for an engine; or what we're going to do with X, Y, or Z."

"The video games are great because I get to work with these really young, brilliant designers and artists. I plant the seeds and they're the ones fertilizing them, watering them. I come in every week for meetings and these guys show me what they've been up to, and I can't help but think, 'Wow, this is just too cool.' So I'm sort of the mentor figure at this point. After creating the threads, the basis for this world, they're taking those threads and creating tapestries with theme, in terms of both design and art. It's an incredible experience."

"The potential is there for that, the way movies are storytelling. I do believe that there'll be a lot better storytelling, especially if you're doing huge, persistent worlds, like an MMORPG. I think so, absolutely. Some of the storylines in games like EverQuest II and World of WarCraft are amazing, but again, in those games—and not to disparage them in any way—but the fact that we're doing things differently, building the story before we really get going, gives us the opportunity to make those stories really fit together in a way that hasn't been done before."

"I predict that within ten years, more people will be playing video games than watching television. I don't see how you can't get to that point. You're seeing interactive T.V. more and more. Knowing how much fun video games are, things like Second Life where the whole gimmick is creating a world for yourself, I firmly believe that we're standing on the edge of this gigantic wave that's going to change the way people are entertained. And I think within that, there are other things as well. Educationally, societal... I think the Internet is shrinking the world, because if you're in my guild, or you're on my arena team, I won't go to war with you (except in game). I see the Internet as this transformative power. If the mainstream media is failing, the Internet will pick up the pieces. I believe in the power of gaming. 'World domination through gaming,' that's the motto for 38 Studios."

I think it's really, really cool to see my books being translated into that format, and to watch the work involved in Andrew Dabb's storyboarding, and then having some of the artists that [publisher] Devil's Due has been putting on these things.... They're taking these images and putting them on such beautiful storyboards. I think it's expanding the audience, and I think it's giving the readers something else to enjoy. I don't know what the percentages are. I'd bet that many people picking up the Drizzt graphic novels are also Drizzt [novel] readers. I'm more concerned with other creative people expanding on something I've done. That's what warms me."

"I'd only met Jim once. We were on a panel together years ago, and didn't even really have the chance to say hello. But, when I read his blog post that announced his disease to his fans, I thought, 'Wow, what a set. That's intestinal fortitude.' He manned up, and I was impressed. I went over to his blog, and I posted, 'From all the people at RASalvatore.com, our well wishes. Fight this, and finish that series.' A lot of my fans are Jordan fans as well. The overlap between all of us is substantial.

"That was during June of [2006], and I didn't think anything of it. Now, I'm working for Tor, which is Jordan's home, so Tom Doherty would give me updates on how Jim was doing. All the sudden, I got an email from Jim last fall, thanking me for the blog post. We only sent a few emails back and forth, because he was spending what little time he had left at his computer, trying to finish his project. He and I had mutual friends, and they would all tell me, 'You have to get to talking with this guy, he's wonderful.'

"I always seemed to follow him on tour, or he followed me. Usually, Terry Brooks is right before me, and then when I go out, it's me, Robert Jordan, and George Martin. We bounced through the same stores. We swapped media escorts all the time, but we never got to talk to each other. It's a huge loss for the fantasy genre."

"The one thing I think people should recognize more about the fantasy genre is that, there are so many levels to it, about why people read fantasy books. Some people read fantasy for no other reason than to forget about a bad day at work. Escapism is a great tactic, if used in moderation. Someone may pick up a Drizzt book because they don't want to think about something bad going on at work. A kid might read a book because he can identify with the heroes and feel empowered by them.

"I wish people, writers in the genre, would appreciate the fact that there are many reasons people have to read a book. First and foremost, I look at my job as an entertainer. If a guy in Baghdad's reading my books to forget about what he had to do that day, that's good. If a kid's reading my books and feeling empowered by them, that's great—but the only one that can make that sort of determination is the reader."

"It always has been," Salvatore says. "Genre literature is literature, and I think that that word, 'literature,' is used as a bludgeon, because people spend so much time trying to prove that they're better than other people. C.S. Lewis said that the only one who can determine the relationship between a book and a reader, is the reader. I don't know what that word 'literature' means, and I don't think the people who wield that word know either. It is what it is, we do what we do, and no one should ask us to apologize for that."

"Well, what happened was, for a few years, I was down to one book a year because I was working at 38 Studios," he began. "When 38 collapsed, it left a big hole in my schedule and in my heart. So I called Wizards [of the Coast] and said, 'Hey, instead of doing one Drizzt book a year, why don't we crank up that schedule and do two a year?' And they were like, 'Uh, yes!'"

"I needed to do that. I needed to bury myself in work just because I didn't want to think about it. It was a painful experience."

"I think we're outstripping the readers. We need to give them time to settle in and catch up," he admitted.

"If I have a due date in August and the book doesn't get done until November, that's okay. I've been doing this for a long time, and there's really not going to be a big edit [on any particular book]. It'll be a small percentage, just around the edges. They're not worried that we'll have to [delay the release], or having to say, 'Okay, you've got to throw this all out and redo it,' which happens sometimes. But at this point, it's completely under control. I know where I'm going and the characters are going to take me there anyway. It's pretty laid back."

"I basically hide away from the main stories as much as I can, but we really don't want to do that anymore because they're licensing more now. There are a couple of computer games set in the Realms: Dungeons & Dragons Online, and Neverwinter, and I'm sure there will be more."

"They're bigger than they've ever been, but not personnel-wise. They're not doing as many products because they're licensing. When you start talking about the numbers involved in computer games, movies, and TV--they're substantially higher, but there are fewer people involved at Wizards."

"It was a blast," Salvatore reminisced. "They threw us into a room. It was Troy Denning, who I love like a brother. I've known Troy for 27 years and I just love his work. Ed Greenwood was there, of course. Ed and I are six months apart in age and we've been together since early on in the Realms. I came in when the Realms really got going. You add Erin Evans, who I think is one of the most talented writers. I hope more people will read her books because she's just wonderful. Her characters are so full of life. Richard Lee Byers was involved. And we also had Paul Kemp, who is just brilliant."

"I went home from that summit and said to my wife, 'I'm home. This is the creative atmosphere that you want when you're working on a project like this.'"

"I'm doing the Blitz, Ed Greenwood's doing the North Africa campaign, Erin Evans' is doing the Holocaust, Paul Kemp's doing the Pacific, and Richard Lee Byers is doing D-Day. We were all doing different things and using different characters, but it's this over-arching event that affects [the Forgotten Realms] as we go."

"Everyone was warning us, 'Oh, pen-and-paper games are dead. It's going to go out there and fall flat,'" Salvatore recalled. "Magic: The Gathering doesn't stop selling, of course. It's phenomenal, just incredible. The [Dungeons & Dragons] 5th Edition [...] is blowing up the shelves. They're in their second printing already. A lot of that is nostalgia, but I think a lot of it is that people are a little tired of staring at computer screens. They want human contact."

"My nephew was playing one of the new Halo games [on Xbox 360], and I wanted to join because all my nephews were playing. They're on my softball team. I'm like, 'I'll play,' and they said, 'You don't want to play.' I said, 'What? Why not?' He gave me his headphones, and there was this 10-year-old kid [in the game], and every word out of his mouth is racist, sexist, and just horrible. I said, 'You've got to be kidding me.' He said, 'It's like that all the time. You don't want to play.'"

"I love Kickstarter. When I did the [DemonWars] Kickstarter, what I loved was, you're out there naked. Your name's on it, you're responsible for it. If I sent a book to somebody and he says it's damaged, I have to replace that book. I like that. That's good pressure, a pressure that reminds you, 'These people are backing you, they believe in you, and you have to deliver.'"

"I remember when [a journalist] called me up and said, 'They owe you $2 million. Why aren't you suing Curt?' Why would I sue Curt? He didn't do anything wrong. He didn't do anything nefarious. Maybe he made a couple of bad business decisions, I don't know. But he didn't do anything nefarious, and he got wiped out. He's lying in the gutter and you want me to kick him in the head? Why would anyone do that?"

"The world was created by my D&D group. I hired them before we had even formed the company to help me create a world. One guy and I really ran with it. We'd be on the phone watching History channel coming up with ideas back and forth, every weekend."

"What I think happened at 38 was when we got to a point where we needed more money and Rhode Island came into the picture," Salvatore told me. "The board decided to go with Rhode Island. From what I'm reading now, it sounded to me that as soon as people found out that Rhode Island was investing tens of millions of dollars into the company, vultures began to circle. They wanted to find ways to alleviate us of that money."

"There's one thing I want to clear up. There's a rumor going around that [Kingdom of Amalur] Reckoningsunk the company.Reckoningbeat expectations. EA were the ones that funded the game with Big Huge Games [primary developer on Reckoning], and that wasn't what I was working on. I was working on the MMO, Project Copernicus. EA funded Reckoning with Big Huge Games, and it was supposed to sell 1.2 million copies [by 90 days after release]."

"We ran out of money. The MMO grew too big, the market kept changing, and it kept getting more expensive to bring a game to market because you had to have these features in it or nobody would play it. We just got bled dry. It wasn't Reckoning [that sunk the company]. The guys at Big Huge Games deserve nothing but applause for what they did."

"No, I don't want to buy it. First of all, I couldn't afford it. [laughs] We're talking a lot of money. But second of all, the amount of work it would take to bring it to game form, in any way, would require a team. I'm a writer. I'm not going to make the same mistake that Curt [Schilling] made and think I can run a company."

"I wrote a story for Curt for his 40th birthday. I love those stories and I want them back, but I would have to buy them. As far as writing books, we'll see what happens. I'm just kind of sitting back and seeing what happens."

"I think it was a case of innocence colliding with very sharp people. It's a very risky business to begin with. Computer-game companies get wiped out all the time, and this was just one of those situations."

"By the time 38 Studios collapsed, Bryan was the guy working on all the classes, all the monster abilities, all the balancing on the MMO. His bosses, huge names in the computer-games industries, were coming up to me and saying, 'Bryan's our star. We throw everything at him and he just keeps hitting it.'"

"I said, 'Bryan, I designed this [tabletop] game in 1990. What do you think of it?' He looked at it and said, 'Well... it sucks. But I can fix it.' So I said, 'Well, fix it.' We had a blast."

"In first-edition Dungeons & Dragons, you have to be able to think on your feet. That's what I liked about EverQuest: monsters could spawn unexpectedly and people could betray you. You had to be agile because the unexpected was going to happen. You had to think outside the box."

"For example, if I'm on a staircase, and we're fighting, and I want to jump off the staircase, grab the chandelier, swing across, drop behind the monsters and pop them one--the GM can assign a difficulty to that," Salvatore said proudly. "I roll an agility to check and see if I can make it. Then I spend my balance to bring it up to the [agility] check so that I make it."

"We love working together. We're doing another Kickstarter, and we might be doing some comics. 'The Education of Brother Thaddius,' the novella I wrote for the DemonWars Kickstarter, is going to Audible, to Kindle. There's a new imprint comic company that said, 'Are the comic rights available for that?' We said, 'Why yes, they are, and Geno and I would love to write it.' So it looks like we'll be working together a lot. It's very cool. I love working with my kids."

"I wanted to tear your heart out," he stated plainly. "When Drizzt woke up that morning and found [Cattie-brie] dead beside him... My goal was, I am going to make this hurt like it has never hurt before."

"One of the things that intrigues me about fantasy is that it is racist," Salvatore explained. "You're not talking about humans, so I guess you can get away with it. Orcs are supposed to be the embodiment of evil in fantasy. It started many years ago when I wrote the short story 'Dark Mirror,' where Drizzt runs into a goblin. He finds out the goblin is an escaped slave. The goblin seems like a great guy, and Drizzt wants to believe that, because he isn't what people expect from a dark elf."

"It's an interesting question because it comes from racial issues, the prejudices that people have, the cultural differences--but I'm always uncomfortable with it. In a way, fantasy does the same thing. Fantasy is a war without guilt. We have slanderous names for whoever we're fighting [during a war]. You dehumanize your enemy because that makes it easier to kill them. Fantasy does that to the ultimate level with orcs, goblins, trolls, and things like that. But there's been a movement in fantasy, because of computer games, to allow people to play as orcs [and other traditionally evil races]. Now people want to know: are orcs really bad?"

"I don't have an answer for Obould's situation. I may never [have an answer]. But it's fun to explore."

"Wizards advanced the Forgotten Realms 100 years. A 140-year-old woman won't fight very well. I didn't want to kill them. The story wasn't done. [Catti-brie] was going in an interesting direction, and I love the character of Regis. My hand was forced."

"By forcing my hand, [Wizards] forced me into an uncomfortable place, and in an uncomfortable place, you have to be really creative to become comfortable again. They forced me to do things I wouldn't have done."

"Sometimes shit just happens," Salvatore said. "Excuse my French, but sometimes it does just happen. What heroic reason was there for my brother to get cancer and die? There's no heroic reason. It just happened. It doesn't make sense. It's ridiculous. You hear about some kid riding his bike and he gets hit by a car. There's no rhyme or reason to that. There's no plan. It's just awful."

"I get 20 letters a day--every day!--from people who say, 'I was in a dark place, and these characters became my friends.' This isn't something like a television series that runs for two years. It's been going for 27 years. There are people in their 40s who were young teenagers when they found Drizzt and are still with him."

"But I thought I had a good way of doing it. I thought it made sense, and I thought I could make a point."

"He thinks, well, if this happened, is everything I did before heroic? That's the question I knew a lot of readers would ask," Salvatore said.

"The thing that drew me to the Realms in the first place was that it was a really hopeful world. Then it became grim after the Spellplague. Very dark, nihilistic, and gritty--I hate that word--which seems to be the trend in fantasy. I hate that trend. I want fantasy to be enjoyable. I want to escape to a better place, not a worse place. So I wanted to restore that sense of optimism."

"You can't believe the letters I get about this book: 'Thank you. My world just got better.' Not everything has to be gritty and depressing all the time."

"When I turned in the manuscript to my editor, I said, 'Half the people are going to love this book, and half are going to hate it. There's nothing I can do about that.'"

"Like I said about the Kickstarter, it made me be responsible for so many things. I like the challenge. I liked being able to name my own [rule] book. If it's a terrible name, hey, at least I named it. I love being able to hire my artist to design my cover. I love being able to hire the editor I want to hire. I'm not afraid of failing, so I'm not afraid of responsibility."

"It's the same thing Robert Jordan went through with Wheel of Time, Terry Brooks went through it with Shannara, George Martin's going through with A Song of Ice and Fire, and J. K. Rowling went through it when she wrote a book that wasn't Harry Potter: she didn't hit anywhere near those numbers. You get pigeon-holed just like actors on TV shows. But you can't complain about that because the fact that you got pigeon-holed means you did something that people accepted and loved."

"When I read a letter from somebody in Iraq who says, 'Thank you. I read your book and it allowed me to forget what I did for today, and not think about what I'll have to do tomorrow'--that's a blessing that I get to be part of that through writing about an elf. So there's nothing to complain about... although I do wish more people would read DemonWars [laughs]. I'll pull people over to DemonWars one at a time. I'm pretty good at it."

"I think I'm beginning to understand how this will end. But, no, nothing specific [in terms of an ending]. Not yet. However, I do expect as of right now that if they said, 'This is the last Drizzt book,' and I had to end it, I do expect it wouldn't end sadly. I wouldn't end on a down note. I thought the last Drizzt book I would ever write for TSR [before Wizards of the Coast acquired TSR] was Passage to Dawn. TSR and I had an ugly break-up. I was done. How did I end that book? With Drizzt and Catti-brie riding off into the sunset. The series would end more like that."