Nice Dan Simmons interview. I particularily like his approach to genre-switching (Have I mentioned here yet that I started work on my third novel, a giant, weird-ass fantasy thing called "A Stranger Comes to Town, a Stranger Leaves Town," just after Xmas? I'm 10,000 words or so into it, and it's totally different from my past two SF novels)
I promised myself more than 20 years ago that if I were ever lucky enough to write full time and continue to be published, that I would write what I wanted to write, enjoy creating different types of novels in different fields of literature just as I enjoy reading such a wide variety of quality fiction. This is a nightmare for publishers. They are quite right to assume — assume hell, they know — that any writer who becomes a bestselling author does so by defining his or her audience and then sticking with them. Readers are human — they like what they like and they feel abandoned when a writer whom they've championed moves away from what they like to read. It's a form of betrayal and I understand the anger when a friendly reader asks me — "When is the next Hyperion novel coming out?" and I respond "Never." But a writer who responds primarily to readers' imperatives has already sold his soul. I've been lucky that whenever one publisher gives up on me — gives up on me hammering away at one type of book until we achieve bestseller status — another publisher gives me the benefit of the doubt.
