Case in point, do you still consider yourself a feminist?

Yes. But you know, that term has become extremely maligned. It's become maligned in the same way that a term like liberal has become maligned. It's become an insult. It's become a term of denigration.

Is there a way to reclaim that term, like, say, homosexuals have reclaimed the term "queer," something that had been an insult, and they turned it into a power symbol? Is there a way for feminists to reclaim that word?

I hope so. I think probably the only way to do it is to just keep shoving it into people's faces. I mean, you know, "We're queer, we're here, get used to it," you know? So you can say the same thing, you know, "I'm a feminist, you know, deal with it." And maybe that's exactly the way to do it.

Now, recently, you've been publishing primarily short fiction. How do you know when a story is more appropriate to be a short story, and when to be a novel?

That's a really hard one. Sometimes you can't answer it until you've written the thing. Let me give you an example. When I was writing my novel, The Shore of Women, I thought it was going to be at most a novella. By the time I got to page about 150, and realized there was a lot more to the story than I had so far set down, I realized it was not going to be a novella. But I would not have known that without sitting down and writing it.

I've had the experience of thinking something was going to be a novel and having it turn into something like a short story. It's something you can learn by experience, but it's a very hard thing to teach anybody. It's basically something you have to find out. You sit down, and you start writing something. And sometimes you're fortunate, and you do have a pretty good idea about how long it's going to be and what's required. But not always. But you have to be open to the possibility that you may sit down and write something that is going to turn into something else: short story, novel or whatever. And the story pretty much decides that.

Now, I know that you've lectured on writing. Have you been on the other side of the desk? Have you taken workshops or courses?

I'm totally self taught. My partner, George Zebrowski, and our friends and colleagues, other writers did lots of writing workshops. I was always afraid of them. I was afraid if I went to any of these things, that I would be just destroyed, that I would come in with my little manuscript and my little story, and it would be torn apart. And I would be deeply wounded and never want to write again. And I thought, "Well, if I'm brave enough to go through the pain of rejection, I would rather go through it by sending the story out to an editor I don't know. At least I know one thing there. It's not going to be the personal. It's not going to be sitting right there with the person telling me. It's going to be at a distance, very non-personal. Painful as it will be, it would be better."

I must confess, I was a coward. I never took any creative writing in college. I never went to workshops, and I basically just had to learn it by doing it. At first I just picked the brains of people who were braver than I was, you know, so that occasionally selling other stories when I submitted it and asked for an opinion. I was lucky that I had good friends like George and like our friend, Jack Dann, who was also an aspiring writer at the time. I was lucky to have people like that that I could ask, and who would tell me, and who wouldn't pull any punches. And who could tell me what to do and advise me on where I might send something. But I was much too cowardly to go to workshops. In fact, even a few years after I had been publishing a few things, I was still debating whether I should go to a Clarion or not. And finally I had good friend who said to me, "If you go now, you might kill the whole thing."

Does it help you now to have that continuing relationship with another writer? I know that you said that you worked independently when you wrote. You don't share it while it's in process. But do you get any kind of feedback, or is it just the knowledge of a kindred spirit?

Actually, the psychological thing is you have another person who doesn't think you are a complete lunatic. So it's a big help if you're a writer. I mean, if you're a writer and you're living with a non-writer, then — and I've heard this from other people — you have to constantly explain to the person when you're lying around for six hours, looking like a complete deadhead doing nothing, that you actually are doing some work. You know, that you're lying in wait for the story to find itself. Now that's very hard to explain to people. There are going to be periods of time when you're basically going to be sort of absent. You're going to be there physically, but your mind's going somewhere else. And you're just not really participating in daily life, above and beyond basic things like getting up, making coffee, putting on clothes, occasionally getting groceries or something. And the rest of the time you're just sort of absorbed in doing something else, with the door closed or at the computer or at your desk or with your notepad or at the library or whatever.

So that does not have to be explained. I understand that. I understand that there are going to be times when we're there when we might as well be a thousand miles away.

The professional aspect is that, even though we do work independently, in the sense that George will write his work by himself, and I'll write mine, but at some point — it's usually when we're at a final draft or the next to the final draft, you have somebody that you can show it to. So that helps, too. So I think it works both ways.

But it's also the kind of thing that, when I think back on it now, there are a million places where it could have just blown completely apart. I mean, if we had become extremely competitive. Or if we had ever, if we were able, in the past few years, to collaborate on four Star Trek novels. But I am sure that if we had tried to collaborate before that, before we each had our own sort of writing thing going on, that we would have gotten into all kinds of arguments at that point. And in fact, we deliberately avoided collaborating, because we didn't want disagreements about artistic or editorial disagreements to be, say, personal disagreements.

I think a collaboration works the best when the two people have their own thing, their own way. And then the collaborative way is actually a bit of writing both of it. It's like a third thing. Almost like a third entity. I don't think we could have reached that point earlier. But I'm most pleased we were able to.