Eric Flint

(continued)

Interview by Alyce Wilson

Were you always drawn to write? Was it something that interested you from early days?

Well, yes and no. I really wanted to write very early on. I wrote my first novel, probably a long novella, when I was 14, 15. I wrote two more novels when I was 16 or 17. I wrote a number of short stories. I used to have — I lost it years ago — a two-page personal, handwritten rejection letter I got once from John Campbell for a story I sent in to him a while ago, in the 60s, which unfortunately got lost in one of my many moves. Then I didn't write for a while and went to college, and then later on I started working with Richard and my two friends on what eventually became the Joe's World books. Then I stopped writing when I got active politically, in the socialist movement, because it's really very hard to do both.

Right. You said you took a break from academia because you felt driven to make a difference in the world and you didn't think that you could do that from within...

No, no it's. [...] Academic -- and I'm not saying this to be defamatory, because I've known a number that I like personally, but being a socialist or a radical of any kind in academia, you really are living in an ivory tower. I just felt, from the time I decided I wanted to be a political activist, that doing it while being a college professor was just not being serious. So I felt strongly, and I still do, that if you really want to make a difference, you're going to have to persuade the industrial working class of the United States. So I went and started working as an industrial laborer. I started as a longshoreman, then became a truck driver, and for the next 25 years went from one industry to the next; been a lot of different things.

Didn't you run for office?

I ran for city council in Birmingham, Alabama in 1979. Didn't win.

Well, that might be a different story. Alternate history, right?

Interestingly enough I got invited last year to an event put on by the Birmingham Library Society. It's the Birmingham libraries, and every year they have an event they call Alabama Bound, where they have a bunch of Alabama authors come, and they give talks at their main library in downtown Birmingham. They invited me as an Alabama author, and I'm thinking, "Good God, how do they remember that I was living there in 1979?"

They probably saw the campaign poster somewhere. What made you want to get serious about writing? You said that about age 45 that you really started to...

Yes, what happened was I started to become politically active, seriously active. I had been active in college, but seriously active in 1970 when I was 23 years old. I'd been active in the anti-war movement and actually in the civil rights movement as a teenager, but it had been kind of intermittent. At that point I basically stopped writing. It was too intellectually and emotionally… you can't do both at the same time. It just doesn't work. I would occasionally fiddle and do some writing. There'd be a few periods here and there where I'd be inactive for a bit of time for one reason or another. There was a stretch in 1977 and another stretch, a fairly long stretch in the mid-80s, a couple of years I wasn't active, and I'd go back and work on the Joe's World books.

[...] By the time I got to 1992, I was 45 years old. By then I'd been active in the socialist movement for about a quarter of a century. Partly, I was just getting kind of tired. It's a pretty strenuous life. First, I felt that whatever obligation I had to the human race was pretty much fulfilled; 25 years of my life, I figured that's good enough. I didn't feel any sort of moral obligation anymore. And partly, I had reached an age — I was 45. There's a long tradition in the socialist movement that I completely support, that you always want to make sure young people are coming up and moving up and taking over and running things, you know? You don't want a bunch of old fogies sitting and running the show forever. It's just stifling. You really need people livening up the organization, young blood. You really do. And that means at a certain point people have to be willing to step aside. That was fine. I completely agreed with it. The one problem, though, is that I knew some people who did that extraordinarily well and admired them a great deal, often spent time with them getting the wisdom of their perspective, but it takes a certain temperament. And I didn't really have the temperament for it. I just don't.

You're not a background kind of guy.

I'm just not. I knew that. And one thing I didn't want to be was I also knew some old-timers who just were a pain in the neck, because they couldn't stop backseat driving. So early on in my 20s I made myself a promise that I would never be like that. So when I was in my mid-40s I was getting kind of tired. I'd been at it for a long time; it was time for me to step aside anyway. At that point the only thing I ever regretted was that I had suspended the writing that I had started as a youngster. Not so much the writing in the abstract, but there was one novel, Forward the Mage, that I had started at the age of 22, and it bugged me that it had been sitting there. I had spent practically my whole adult life with these characters and the story. I just realized in my mid-40s that whatever else, I did not want to wind up on my deathbed really wishing I had tried to write that book and never gotten it done.

Right.

So at that point I resigned from the socialist party I belonged to, and I worked overtime at the steel mill. I wanted to buy a computer, which was quite expensive in those days. I took a fragment of what was originally intended to be a chapter, which did eventually become the prologue to The Philosophical Strangler, and I looked at it and said, this would make a decent short story. I reshaped it a little bit as a short story and I sent it in to The Writers of Future contest in the fall of '92. Then I started working on Forward the Mage. Then I won that contest; I won first place that quarter. That was a big boost to my self-confidence. Then based on that I managed to get an agent, Shawna McCarthy, who had just lost her job at Bantam and was setting up as an agent. And she liked Forward the Mage a great deal, although it had some problems, which she pointed out to me, and I rewrote it with Richard. But she also warned me from the start that it was going to be a hard book to sell. Because it's a serialistic, comic, fantasy. It didn't really fit any...

It wasn't easy to pigeonhole it.

It's not easy to fit it. And so, sure enough, a couple of years' time went by, and it proved very hard to sell. Then she told us to take it off the market, because there was no point in getting more rejection slips. In the meantime...

You worked with David Drake after that, then?

No, no. What I did next was I figured all right, I'll sit down and try to write a much more straightforward science-fiction novel, just as a way to get established. And that's in the fall of '93. I got laid off for a stretch. I was working at a steel mill, a steel plant, and we got laid off, which wasn't unusual, a seasonal layoff. So I took six weeks to write Mother of Demons. I sent it to my agent. Shawna started shopping it around, and I went back to work on the Joe's World series. Those were a couple of rough years, before '95, because it's frustrating. You've got books out there; you never hear anything. Months go by. It's really not any fun at all. It was depressing, and I would tell myself the thing to do was keep writing, but it's kind of hard to keep plugging away at it, especially when you're working a job that's 16 hours a week. But I did get quite a bit of work done on that series and then in early '96 I got a call from my agent. She said, "Toni Weiskopf at Baen Books had read the manuscript and liked it and was recommending it to Jim."

Jim Baen.

Jim Baen. Then I had to wait another six months before Jim read it. And Jim liked it, and he bought it. [...] We had phone conversations for two days around the time I sold Mother of Demons, and then he asked me on the second day how I would feel. He actually asked me, "Do you know who Belisarius was?" And I said, "Sure." I rattled off who he was, and he said, "Oh, good. I've got a project here for a trilogy written by — plotted by David Drake. where he's plotted it, and we need someone to write it. Would you be willing to do it?" And I said, "Sure." So he said, "Fine." That's how I got a contract for what was originally intended to be a trilogy, the Belisarius Trilogy, with David Drake. Then I called David on the phone and we went from there.

I spent '97 and all of '98, the next year and a half I spent working just on the Belisarius series. I had the first — I think it was — four novels done. It was a series. I write longer than Dave does, so it what was intended to be a trilogy; each book wound up becoming two. Although Dave's going to reissue it this year, and they're going to combine it as a big, fat omnibus trilogy, which is actually the way it should be written. It was in '99, late '98, early '99 that I had the idea for 1632. Jim liked it, and he bought it. I started working on it, did the research for it in March of [that year].