Christie Golden, author of the Warcraft novels Rise of the Horde and Lord of the Clans, sat down to answer questions with The Shadow Council Strider. For several weeks readers submitted questions via email, and Christie was kind enough to respond to them in an article published today. We learn that Christie will be writing more novels in the Warcraft universe, having just signed a contract for a trilogy.The discussion I found most fascinating in this first part of the article series had to do with Christie's access to The Burning Crusade. Basically the reader wanted to know if she had influence over the game design of Outland, or if her stories were wrapped around the content that was already put into the game. As it turns out, while most of the world was already in place when Christie was hired on, she did get to flush out some concepts in Outland, particularly having to do with Oshu-gun and that Ata'amal crystals. Because she had already finished her first draft, several of the creatures she created in the novel were put into the game, for instance the majestic Talbuk.
The last two questions had to do with Christie's life as a writer. Christie talked about her "Trunk novel," that first book she wasn't able to sell, and the subsequent novels she did publish that were set in the same universe. Because of her non-fiction writing and editing experience with USA Today she wasn't new to dealing with selling the written word. It's interesting to note that Christie never wrote fan fiction for WoW, which is certain surprising considering how well she writes about the world of Azeroth. When asked about suggestions for those new to writing, her advice to new writers was to write as often as you can, and also spend some time outlining to better plan out your work.
The next section of the Q & A is due out soon, and I'm definitely eager to find what else she has to say. If you had a question for Christie Golden, what would it be?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
11-05-2007 @ 8:27PM
Dave said...
I'm sure some uber-nerd will correct me... but most legitimate authors don't write fanfic for anything at all.
fanfic is left to people who for whatever reason wanted some sort of a writing career but didn't want to go to school for it. I've met quite a few authors of what in other terms would amount to fanfic, and the vast majority of them are actually just into writing and have to basically research and learn about things they write about, rather than being heavily involved in them already and just happening to get a book deal for it. You can usually tell by the style of writing which is which.
One of my english professors in college wrote a few Star Trek novels. As far as I could tell, she wasn't any sort of overenthusiastic fanfic writer, she was just a person who wrote good sci-fi and found a good job doing a pre-existing universe.
It's maybe something people who write fanfic should think about. Just cause you're obsessed with something (and I'm not even getting into the more deviant varieties of fanfic) doesn't mean you're going to get a book deal for writing something about it.
I'd actually like to know for real, how much WoW she played before writing it, or if it was just a story immersion based on written lore that she got from Metzen?
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11-06-2007 @ 2:27PM
pENTAcUBE said...
By far one of my favorite writers, rivaled closely by Timothy Zahn.
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