The first time I saw Walter Jon Williams, he was singing a song to mock Asimov’s then editor, Gardner Dozois. Melinda Snodgrass, Ellen Datlow, and Pat Cadigan sang backup.

My second sighting was a picture in that month’s Locus of Walter standing with Daniel Abraham and his bride, Kat, several other writers, and a toilet prominently displayed in the foreground. Said toilet was the writers’ group gift to the newlywed couple. Rather than slip a gift receipt into a card, or have the toilet delivered to the house, the writers group decided to carry the appliance into the reception on their shoulders.

And no, neither of those are the craziest stories I know about the award winning, bestselling author, Walter Jon Williams. By all means, read on!

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Michelle Muto has never properly observed Talk Like a Pirate Day, but can tell you how a human body decomposes. She managed to get that information out of city workers without having them turn her in to the police or psych ward. After a time with a large literary agency that decided, ultimately, that her work was too much like another client’s and thus they could not represent her, she took the plunge and became an indie writer, and I am so glad she did.

I discovered her first by reading five star review after five star review of her book, Don’t Fear the Reaper, and by the time I got around to reading it, knew immediately that I wanted to meet and get to know the author who wrote it. She kindly agreed to let me interview her.

Oh, and she should know how to talk like a pirate because she’s a direct descendant of William Howard. So it’s obvious right? Okay, maybe not. He was Blackbeard’s quartermaster.

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Daniel Abraham and I met at the Millenium PhilCon, my first ever WorldCon. I noted that he had “Albuquerque, New Mexico” under his name on his badge, so I let him know that I was from Los Alamos, and then a few caffeine fueled day/night cycles later, I found myself invited to join his writers group. I’m very glad I did. Like me, Daniel is a Clarion West graduate, though we attended different years. He is the only person, that I know of, who has had his wedding picture in Locus with a toilet prominently displayed in the foreground. That was a gift from said writers group.

I still remember the email Daniel sent when he landed his first novel deal, a four book series with Tor. I was there when he workshopped his first Jayne Heller book, for which he adopted the pen name MLN Hanover, and I was the person he and Ty Franck, the other half of the duo who writes as James SA Corey, knew in common. Ty came to New Mexico for a visit and inevitably met the rest of the writers group, which he would later join.

In the following email interview, I got a chance to catch up with Daniel and revisit some of the stories he’s told me over the years.

An Interview with Daniel Abraham, aka M.L.N. Hanover, aka James S.A. Corey

Conducted and Edited by Emily Mah, November, 2011

Emily Mah: I always think of the story of how you became a writer as beginning pre-natally, when your mother dreamed of you becoming an architect. Care to share what followed from this?

Daniel Abraham: Well the short form of the story is that my mother wanted to be an architect from the time that she was 12, only this was the 60s.  When she got pregnant with yours truly, her first thought was “Oh well, maybe I’ll have a son and he’ll be an architect.”  Her second thought was something like “Ohmigod, did I just think that?”  What followed from that was that I spent my gentle formative years with my Spanish-fluent hippie English major father while my mother got her architectural degree.  He read to me a lot all through my childhood, and apparently some of it stuck.

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I’ve known S.M. Stirling, or Steve as his friends call him, for ten years now. He and I were in the same writers group in New Mexico, called Critical Mass, and I believe I’ve read exactly eight-five kajillion of his words. A rigorous editor and rewriter of his own work, he’d often dwarf the rest of our submissions for the month. It’s been my privilege to watch from this vantage point as he climbs the sales charts, from a well respected niche writer to now a New York Times bestselling one.

Unfortunately, my move from New Mexico to London ended my time in Critical Mass, but not the friendships or the contact, thanks to the miracles of modern technology. Steve’s career continues to move from strength to strength as he fleshes out his Emberverse series. Set in a future in which some of the laws of physics have taken a vacation, humanity must live without electricity, gunpowder, or even steam power. Any attempt to harness these old technologies falls flat. Magic and mythical visions, however, gain strength with each passing year. To me, this a brilliant fantasy premise that makes use of the science fiction conceit, “it could happen someday”. The characters learn to make castles out of concrete and swords out of scrap metal. SCA members find their fluency in Tolkein Elvish and armor making skills useful in a way they never imagined. Wicca becomes a mainstream religion, and a history professor who once worshipped the despots of old becomes one. Whether you’ve actually made your own chain mail, or merely think that’s a cool idea, you should give his books a try.

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