The Sharing Knife felt really incomplete. I always enjoy Bujold's writing, but I felt it was one of her weakest books, certainly when compared to her more recent work. Her writing is as good as ever, but the plot starts with a bang, and the rest is just, well, there. No real threat, not compared to what's been put into the background. I did enjoy the family dynamic, and it was great watch a bunch of emotional guns get put on the wall and then fired in ways that weren't quite expected or stereotypical, but compared to something like Memory, it was lacking. I hope the second book is better.

Also read lately and enjoyed: Glasshouse by Charlie Stross, and Terrier by Tamora Pierce. Stross does a bit 'more of the same' by his standards, but very well and in ways most people wouldn't think to do. (I picked Glasshouse over The Jennifer Morgue because I know I'm doomed to read the latter, so it meant I would read Glasshouse all the sooner.)

Terrier is very different, for Pierce. She's stretching herself as a writer, walking down paths she hasn't done well before. In particular, she's getting into the grit of a street-level fantasy world in a way she really hasn't done before. I actually got a feel for the economy of Tortall, how it works (and doesn't), and didn't have to suspend my disbelief that, yes, the 95% of the population that isn't nobility is out there somewhere, growing the food, doing the shipping, and just trying to get by.

So, the questions:

1. How do you 'stretch' yourself as an author, particularly when you start to get a reputation for doing certain things well. I'd imagine there's a temptation to get comfortable with a few certain tropes. (For certain authors, they seem to find their tropes, settle into them, and never move away.)

2. When you feel like a world you create has solid underpinnings is it easier to write than something that feels like it's written on quicksand, or harder because it feels constrained? The Ile-Rien stuff always felt very solid to me, and even when the state was failing, that felt 'right' because it was failing in ways that an invaded nation would fail in a military conquest. By contrast, City of Bones never felt quite right to me. I didn't get a good feel for where all the food was coming from, which is the main thing I really have to get from a fantasy world to believe it.

I really hope this question hasn't been asked and answered already - if it has, just ignore it. I will poke around more thoroughly and find the original question. :p

One of the things that I really loved about the Ile-Rien books was that they're set in a different time period than most fantasy. Usually, writers fall back upon the middle ages, the pre-Roman Celtic era etc. Was the decision to start Ile-Rien at a later date, so to speak, a conscious one (did you think "I'm really tired of stupid Celtic fantasies, let's try something with corsets and steam engines") or did it just...happen?

Because, as I said, that was one of the things I really loved about your books. Especially Death of the Necromancer, I really felt that the time period figured in prominently. I know "Victorian" fantasy has become a bit more popular (partly, I suppose, to steampunk expansion) but it's still a minority. Personally, I find it a more interesting time period for reading about and creating characters in, if only because the vices are so much more interesting. You can put cigarettes in a story about Renaissance Italy, after all.

only a comment, not a question.

ever since we (my husband & I) discovered your work, we'd been looking for Element of Fire. I was ever so happy to be able to read your re-write (chapter by chapter) on-line here, and then to be able to by the book from Lulu to give my husband for Christmas (since reading on-line strains his eyes).

He's part-way through, and commented that he was glad to finally know the queen that the ship was named after, and what an awesome woman she was (and he hasn't gotten to the "best part" - for me - of the queen's action yet).

Thank you for getting Element back out in print!

I thought The Sharing Knife was really well written, and the characters are interesting enough that I didn't really notice that nothing was happening until I was nearly to the end. As one review said, it is very "domestic"...I hope the sequel (or, more correctly) gives us a little more of the fantastic.

Seems to me you wrote a tie-in novel recently, but I've lost track of that posting. Was it Stargate or something else?

Thanks,
Oz

Something that sprung to mind as I am revelling my way through the Fall of Ile-Rien again:

You've written prequel Giliead and Ilias novellas - are there any plans for any sequel snippets?

Also - do you have favourite characters in your novels as you write them?

I don't think you been asked this one:

How do you decide where to start your novels? Most of them seem to start very much "in media res" and I love the way you orient your readers without massive info-dumps.

When you are developing an idea, how long do you spend on research?

Do you find there's a point at which you have to dive in and start writing, or lose your steam, leaving any remaining problems or questions to be corrected later, during the rewriting process?

Okay, this is really silly, but I've been wondering for a long time now; the villain in The Death of the Necromancer; is his name pronounced Mon-tesk or Mon-tes-cue?

(And I'd been wondering, actually, even before they asked me when I chose the book for the little book club I was part of . . .)

In replies to other questions, you've described copyeditors making what seem to me are some pretty startling changes to your work, yet, and gladly so, those peices remain in the works I've read.

How do you deal with editors who want to make such changes? What's the back and forth process with 'bad' editors like, and how does it compare with that of 'good' ones?

... is there a difference between 'copyeditor' and 'editor'?

This isn't really a deep question. The end of The Element of Fire definitely ties things up, but I've always wondered what happened to Thomas and Kade afterward. To what degree do you know/have planned the future of the characters beyond the scope of the novels in which they appear?

I've been meaning to ask this for quite some time now.. I believe you stated somewhere that you had gone through the whole of The Element of Fire before the publication of the POD edition. What sort of changes are we talking about? Just spelling corrections, or actual rewrites?