No Book Or Poem Is Ever Finished,

Speaking As A Novelist Myself, I Know That Members Of Our Profession Live In Our Imaginations As Much Or More As We Inhabit What People Call 'the Real World.

When I Get About Five Readers I Can Rub Together In One Genre, I Leave That Genre And Go Somewhere Else. And This Is Due To A Vow That I Made Myself When I Started Writing - That If I Had Any Success At All, I Would Not Be Bound To One Form Of Writing. That I Would Write What Moves Me. The Only Way I Can See Me Surviving And Doing More Than One Book Is To Present The Readers With A Dan Simmons Novel, With Whatever Tropes And Protocols From Whatever Genre I Want To Borrow Them. If That Builds A Dan Simmons Readership, Well Then, Okay. Otherwise, Forget About It. I'd Rather Drive A Truck.

Each Heart Has Its Graveyard, Each Household Its Dead, And Knells Ring Around Us Wherever We Tread, And The Feet That Awhile Made Our Pathway So Bright Pass On To A Land That Is Out Of Our Sight.

You've Probably Heard About The Theory Of Steam-engine Time - That Even After The Steam Engine Had Been Invented, It Had To Wait Until People Were Ready To Make Use Of It. The Same Thing Happens In Literary Circles. The Truth Is, I'm Not Terribly Interested In Victorian Times; I'm Interested In Victorian Writers. I'm Interested In Most Eras Of History, But Not The Victorian Era Especially. I Was Interested In The John Franklin Expedition. I Was Interested In These Last Five Weird Years Of Dickens' Life. And I Just Have To Take The Age That Comes With All That When I Write About It.

Laws Had A Bad Habit Of Being Ignored Or Abrogated When Societal Push Came To Totalitarian Shove.