This is the first Deep Blue Interview since moving to this cool new WordPress site…this time out we have author Richard Dansky, whose new novel FIREFLY RAIN is just out in hardcover from Wizards of the Coast. There’s a review of that novel HERE. You can buy it by clicking the book cover…

Without further ado…

RICHARD DANSKY - A DEEP BLUE INTERVIEW

by David Niall Wilson

DBJ: In your recent novel, Firefly Rain, you paint a very vivid picture of rural North Carolina life. Is this a life you are familiar with, or did you build it from millions of Andy Griffith reruns and word of mouth?

RD: The small town in Firefly Rain comes from a couple of different sources. One is simply having lived in North Carolina for eight years, and having taken as many opportunities as I could to see more of the state than just downtown Raleigh. My wife and I live in East Durham, but there’s a working farm down the block from us, and more five minutes away. We also love getting out of the Triangle – we actually got married up on the Blue Ridge Parkway – and just seeing what there is to see.

The other half of the equation comes from visiting my wife Melinda’s family and friends out in central Missouri. She grew up on a farm in a small town, and getting dropped into the middle of that when I went out to visit was something else altogether. Just watching how folks interacted with each other in a way that was very different from my urban/suburban upbringing brought a lot to the book, and to the portrayal of Maryfield. The moments in particular that stood out came after Melinda’s father died, and we had to go into Fulton to deal with some of the legal and financial issues. Seeing how everything there knew Melinda and picked up with her like she’d never been away really helped crystallize things in my mind for when I sat down to write.

And for whatever it’s worth, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an episode of the Andy Griffith Show through to the end. It always came on during rain delays during Braves games, and I never had the patience to sit through them to get back to the good stuff.

DBJ: Having written for so many video games, and edited for White Wolf in their World of Darkness, how difficult is it to turn your writing – and your career - in this new direction as a novelist, and how does the change “feel”?

RD: Writing fiction, especially long fiction, is a tremendous change from writing video games. With video games, you’re writing plot, exposition, and dialogue, and that’s it. You don’t write mood or tone or description – that’s what the art assets are for. So your job as a game writer is to convey as much information and characterization as you can in as little dialogue as possible, because they player is there to play, not to listen to voice actors read your deathless prose. What you get out of that is a very stripped-down approach to writing that’s very much to the point, but which doesn’t really allow for you to stretch your muscles setting the scene or getting inside characters’ heads.

The other big change is that it’s equal parts frightening and exhilarating to be playing in my own sandbox, as opposed to Tom Clancy’s or the World of Darkness or something else “established”. Even when you’re working on a new IP in games, it’s an immensely collaborative process, and at the end of the day the company takes away from you and puts it where they see fit. It may be back in your hands, it may be with a development team halfway around the world, it may be on the shelf. Also, anything you do has to be done with the fact that you’re creating a property in mind – can the world be adapted to another type of game, is there room for expansion packs, and so forth.

Writing my own stuff, on the other hand, means it’s all me – succeed or fail, stand or fall. It’s a little scary not to have the fallback of a hundred previous Vampire supplements or a best-selling series of video games to fall back on, but at the same time, it feels great to be able to take a crack at what I want to do without worrying about how it might affect the level production pipeline.

DBJ: Your writing career has been very diverse. Given this, I would expect that the things that have influenced you (not just other authors and books) would be varied as well. What “moves” you to write? Music, entertainment, philosophy, pet goldfish with mind-control helmets? What - in other words - is behind the words?

RD: Most of my writing falls out of a single image. I’ll see something, or get a picture in my head, and then start going nuts trying to figure out where that picture comes from. What’s the story behind it, and why is it important? Firefly Rain, for example, came out of the first night I ever spent at my wife’s parent’s farm in Missouri. We were outside walking the property in the moonlight, and the line between the darkness at the treeline and the bright moonlight on the fields was just absolutely striking. That image stuck with me, and summer in North Carolina added fireflies, and off it went from there. “Suburban Sprawl”, one of the stories I have up over at Amazon shorts, came from seeing a clear-cut section of forest bleeding red mud into the streets during a rainstorm, awaiting the start of construction on a strip mall. And so it goes from there.

Once I actually sit down to write, music tends to get more important in maintaining the mood of the piece and keeping me focused on writing it. At this point, I’ll actually sit down and make an iTunes playlist of the songs I think are appropriate for what I’m going to be working on, and I’ll continually fiddle with it as I buy new stuff or find that some of what’s in there doesn’t work. Firefly Rain was written in large part to a steady diet of Johnny Cash, Tom Petty, and the Drive-By Truckers, for example. Vaporware, the manuscript I just wrapped up, is set at a video game company, so the writing music for that ended up boiling down to lots of game soundtracks, mixed in with a ton of Rush and Pink Floyd and suchlike. It’s important, too, for the duration of the project I need to make sure I only listen to that stuff when I’m writing, or it loses the association with the project.

DBJ: With this first novel behind you, what is next? How do you see (in a perfect world) your career progressing from this point, and what should fans of your writing look for in the future?

RD: With luck, more of everything. I’m very lucky in that I really enjoy working in video games, and that my work there generally leaves me enough time to work on my own writing as well. In a perfect world, I’d be able to keep working on both. Honestly, I just love writing, and I’m fortunate in that I seem to be able to do it well enough in a variety of formats that folks want me to keep on doing it. It’s a very different feeling to hold a book I wrote in my hands than to play a game I worked on, but they’re both a thrill.

As for what’s coming up, I’m attached in various ways to about a half-dozen video games I’m not allowed to talk about yet. On the fiction side, I’ve just completed the manuscript for what will hopefully be the next novel, and I’m working on a project beyond that in collaboration with one of the other members of my writing group, the Bastard Sons of Mort Castle. I wish I could say I had a carefully tuned plan for world writing domination worked out, but it’s mostly just a case of keeping on writing as much as I can in whatever fields I can.

DBJ: Obligatory question. You have one day to come up with the inspiration to write something new. You have the choice of spending it in a library with all the books ever published, in a studio with all the world’s music available to you, or a magic car to take you to any spot on the planet for the day. What do you choose, and why?

RD: I think I’d have to pick the last option, to see what I could see and, more importantly, talk to folks there about what I was seeing and what might have happened in that place. What place? I don’t know – that’s the first half of the inspiration, I guess. Maybe Venice, maybe Vienna, maybe the middle of nowhere; figuring it out would be part of the fun.

I guess I feel I’d be able to find most of the books or hear most of the music after the day was over – I trust my mad ‘leet Google skills that much - but the view from whichever place I chose would never be exactly the same again. And if my writing does come out of single moments and images, I’d hate to lose the opportunity to see that one instant that could be the trigger for everything else to follow.

You can find more about Rich, his writing, and his life at: HIS WEBSITE!