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Kevin J. Anderson is the New York Times best-selling author of over 100 books, including several novels in the Star Wars, X-Files, Superman, Batman, and Dune universes. His writing has been nominated for the Nebula Award and the Bram Stoker Award. He has co-authored more than 10 Dune novels with Brian Herbert. The original Dune, written by the late Frank Herbert, was the first best-selling hardcover science fiction novel and has been frequently cited as the world's best-selling science fiction novel.
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This episode originally aired on 11/12/2009 with the following authors:
Note: The following interview has been transcribed from The Author Hour radio show. Please excuse any typos, spelling and gramatical errors.
Interview with Kevin J. Anderson | | |
Bonus Question(s) that Didn't Air on the Live Radio Show
Note that you can also listen to this while you read it.
Go to Brian Herbert's page to read his bonus questions.
Kevin J. Anderson:
I’m like a vending machine, you put a nickel in me and stuff just starts coming out.
Matthew Peterson:
[laughs] Let me ask you a couple quick bonus questions though anyway, because I thought these were interesting. So here’s your bonus question, Kevin: I understand that you helped with a new anthology that’s coming out [in paperback] called Blood Light. I’m actually interviewing a lot of the authors from that anthology like Charlaine Harris and [Sherrilyn] Kenyon and Kelly Armstrong. Tell us a little bit about your role in that anthology.
Kevin J. Anderson:
Well, my role was to basically be chief babysitter and cat herder and all kinds of things on that. The Horror Writers of America, which I’m a member of, they asked if I would try to come up with an anthology idea for them because it’s one of the ways that they spread awareness of their organization and put a little money into their medical fund. And I’ve always been a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and An Army of Darkness and a lot of the horror movies that had an interesting humorous twist to them. I thought that the humor makes the horror even more palletable. I loved Little Shop of Horrors and things like that. And I thought, “Well, let’s just do an anthology of stories that are horror stories but with a humorous twist.”
And everybody loved that idea and so then I started calling up friends and finding out who would be interesting in contributing, and as you’ve mentioned, Charlaine Harris said she would and Sherrilyn Kenyon and Jim Butcher said he would be in there, Sharyn McCrumb who writes these fabulous Apalacian mystery novels but she also wrote funny mystery novels that I love called Bimbos of the Death Sun and Zombies of the Gene Pool. We just have all kinds of different authors: Kelly Armstrong as you mentioned and Joe Lansdale who is one of my favorite authors and has been for years and years.
So I got some of my friends who are also established and successful authors to join in the project, but because this was a Horror Writers of America anthology--sorry, it’s Horror Writers Association; I gotta get what the letter A stands for correct--we also opened it up to their membership. So after getting the stories from my friends, the big name authors, then we got a flood of submissions from other writers who were members of the organization. So I got to go through that stack and just picked the very best gems that were out of that one, and we put together that book. And even as we speak, in fact, it was probably just this morning it was confirmed that I’ll be editing Blood Light 2 for probably a year from now, so that’ll be out. It give you lots of blood and lots of laughs at the same time.
Matthew Peterson:
Yeah. Well, it’s good to know there’s going to be another one too.
Kevin J. Anderson:
It’s not a very restrictive anthology. I just tell people, “Write me a horror story that’s funny too.” So authors like that. They don’t like to have their hands tied too much, and when you’ve got somebody with the talent of Jim Butcher or Charlaine Harris or Kelly Armstrong, they’re going to turn in something really good. And they did.
Extra Material That was Cut from the Show Because of Time Constraints
We're still transcribing this and getting the audio read, but you can listen to the bonus questions right now.
Go to Brian Herbert's page to read his extras.
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