News & Blog by Jack Dann
Read the latest news and bulletins, essays, features, opinions from our bestselling authors. Find out what's being said, debated, and discussed in the world of books and ideas.
An original anthology happens in much the same way as a reprint anthology with one major exception: The anthologist asks the authors to write stories on the anthology’s theme. It isn’t always easy to reach bestselling authors, but since I’ve been doing anthologies for many years, I’ve gotten to know a lot of people in the business—both as a writer and as an editor....
There are two kinds of anthologies: reprint and original. The Dragon Book is original, in that none of the stories have appeared anywhere else before. They are all new. A reprint anthology is much easier. The anthologist gathers a fistful of stories that he’s read in magazines or other anthologies that he really likes, arranges them in an order that feels right, and, voila, one has a reprint...
Before I began today’s blog, I surfed the net a bit and found that a website called Daily Screenwriter (http://screenwriterdaily.blogspot.com) had posted a quote I gave some time ago in an interview. The funny thing is that same quote is constantly reprinted on the web—not that it’s such a great quote. In fact, it states the obvious, but maybe it’s a useful observation about...
The late Avram Davidson—who wrote some of the most interesting fantasy novels and stories of the 20th Century—once said, “Although the wombat is real and the dragon is not, nobody knows what a wombat looks like and everyone knows what a dragon looks like.” Well, although we Australians know what a wombat looks like, he’s probably right that everyone else doesn’t....
I’m not sure how the young adult category is defined by scholars and purists, but I think the basic difference between YA and ‘adult’ is that in YA the protagonists are…young. So trilogies such as The Lord of the Rings and Philip Pullman’s The Dark Materials are, to my mind, YA. I’m writing this blog while I’m writing a fantasy novel that takes place in...
