You talk about knowing with Traitors’ Gate what _has_ to happen. But don’t you find that sometimes your characters don’t want things to happen the way you think they have to happen? I loved TG and especially the amazing way you dealt with your characters, who did some things that truly surprised me–and that, I thought, was wonderful.

As for a Muse. I’m kind of prosaic in that I feel like I do all the writing, some of it with my conscious mind and some with my subconscious and unconscious (I’ve learned when to let go with my conscious controlling mind and let another element take over). Having said that, I do think that creativity is, if you will, a spark of something that we really can’t explain. Where that comes from, I can’t say (because I don’t know).

His name is Leroy. He lives in a trailer. He drives a Chevy and is missing some teeth. He likes to drink beer and blow stuff up on the weekends. But by day, he works the production line of my Story Factory.

He is not alone. H. Phinneas Smythe, a man who likes to wear white suits and sounds a good deal like Dr. Frasier Crane, is responsible for Quality Assurance and frequently meddles in Leroy’s work. Sometimes Leroy locks him in the trunk of his Mercedes. If he forgets to take away the cell phone, Smythe calls in the Chattering Head Monkeys.

Of course, in all seriousness, I think the writing flows out of the Soup of our Subconcious and is made up of the same raw material as our dreams with the added bonus of our higher brains layering in some bits conciously.

I don’t really believe there’s a Factory buried deep inside of me or a little gap-toothed redneck working the levers and cranking out fiction under his QA Manager’s suspicious eye.

Well, okay, maybe I believe it…a little.

Me too! I had a story that started off as a short story (which eventually evolved into the novel I keep telling myself I’m writing presently), with a vague outline (in my head) of the characters and the situation. At the time, only two or three of the characters were well drawn, but as the tale lengthened I began to find that some of the side characters were fascinating, complex and much more interesting than I had intended. So much so that when that character kicked it, several of my classmates (in a college fiction course) wanted me to retcon him back in.

I refused, of course. But I’ve never escaped the exhilaration of discovering something I didn’t know was there, and letting that, temporarily, lead my writing.

And, on a sort of related note, Kate, I wonder how you feel about the concept of a Muse? I’ve talked with other writers, and some of them are absolutely convinced that what comes out on the page is the product of their own fancy, something that was born, incubated, and nurtured without any outside help, and I’ve met a few who are just as convinced that their inspiration comes from a Muse, or a genius that feeds them, not the other way round. The concept has always fascinated me, and I wonder how you and Ken feel about it.