PowellsBooks.Blog

Describe your latest book/project/work.
I write the Avengers Assemble and Captain Marvel comic books at Marvel and Ghost at Dark Horse. My first creator-owned book — a gothic western called Pretty Deadly — is coming out from Image Comics later this year.

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
I've done everything from special effects makeup to event clowning to post-operative wound care.

Writers are better liars than other people: true or false? Why or why not?
False. The best writers are adept at telling truths. Sounds pretentious as all hell, but I believe it to my core.

Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
"Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs." – Ernest Hemingway.

How do you relax?
With great effort.

How did the last good book you read end up in your hands, and why did you read it?
Warren Ellis sent me a proof copy of Gun Machine. So now I'm just bragging.

Describe your latest works.
I have two Forgotten Realms novels coming out this year, along with a graphic novel about a relevant side story. The first book, The Last Threshold, was just released in March to wind up the four-book Neverwinter Saga. In this series, I explored the issue of my hero, Drizzt, falling in with a group of shady companions, with the main conflict centering around whether he would lift them up or they would bring him down. The new book resolves that — but, of course, it also opens up a ton of new possibilities.

The comic, beginning in April from IDW, will add a bit of flavor on the outside of those conflicts.

The heart of all of this comes out in August with The Companions. The only thing I can say about that book is that, for me, it's the payoff of 25 years with this character I hold so dear.

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
I paid my way through college as a bouncer in a nightclub. Every night was an adventure — ...

In celebration of Geek Week, Powells.com presents a special Dungeons and Dragons–themed Q&A with Patton Oswalt.

What's the most epic character you've ever created?
A half-orc assassin named Ulvaak through which I channeled all of my frustrations about being a fat eighth grader. Apparently I wanted to split everything in half with a sword.

What alignment do you most closely identify with: Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic?
Lawful, but only because of my OCD. There's no good or evil to it.

Describe your longest campaign.
Oh man. Probably this epic, Béla Tarr–style slog through a continent called Gamotia, where the fabric of reality was ripping open and different demons were vying for dominance of the material plane. You know, everyday stuff like that.

Personal question: Did you let anyone touch your lucky d20?
Not only did no one touch it, but I would use an El Marko to color the 10-and-up numbers black, then I'd scrape away the permanent marker ink but leave the indented numbers still filled in with ink. OCD is a hell of a thing.

Eberron, Vanadorn, or a campaign of your own creation?
I'd want to create ...

Describe your latest game/project/work.
Right now, we're in the middle of playtesting Munchkin Pathfinder. The Pathfinder RPG, from Paizo, is one of the most popular fantasy role-playing games on the market, and its rules and setting provide a rich background to draw from for the next Munchkin card game. "Playtesting," for those who don't know, is the process of trying a version of a game to see what works and what doesn't. It involves playing a game over and over, with small (or not-so-small) tweaks each time, ultimately leading to a game that's much better than it could have been otherwise.

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
Other than this one, which is both the strangest and most interesting, I'd have to go with my first-ever summer job: cleaning industrial ice cream machines at the main manufacturing plant for a Texas-based grocery chain. It taught me a lot about the dignity of doing a necessary job well, even when that job is not what most people would consider glamorous or exciting. It also taught me that I did ...

Describe your latest book.
News from Heaven is a collection of 10 short stories set in and around Bakerton, the western Pennsylvania coal town that was the setting for my second novel, Baker Towers.

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
Cleaning office buildings at night.

Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
Two come immediately to mind, both by Don DeLillo. The first is from Underworld: "Longing on a large scale is what makes history."

The second is from Libra: "There is a world inside the world."

Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
When I landed in Iowa City in 2000, I couldn't stop thinking of Denis Johnson's story collection Jesus' Son. It wasn't exactly a pilgrimage, since I had other reasons for being there, but I saw his stories everywhere.

What is your favorite indulgence, either wicked or benign?
My boyfriend's homemade bread, straight out of the oven, with copious butter.

Name the best television series of all time.
HBO's The Wire. It's the best novel I've ever seen.

Who's wilder on tour, rock bands or authors?
Rock bands. (Good Lord, let's hope so.)

Dogs, cats, budgies, or ...

Describe your latest book.
Fuse is the second installment in the Pure Trilogy, which follows a group of characters in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian world. In the first novel, Pressia, a 16-year-old girl with a doll head fused to her fist, is surviving in this detonated, ash-choked world, and Partridge has survived inside of a protective dome; their lives are set on a collision course when he escapes the dome to try to find his mother. In the second novel, I got to return to the psychological viciousness of the dome and also to take on new landscapes and terrains, new beasts and creatures. I remain haunted by the questions posed in the first novel – what endures the apocalypse. The novels are brutal, but that allows me to push the characters to ultimate resilience as well as human failures.

If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
Oh, poor biographer, weedy and pale. I wish you'd latched onto someone greater, who heaved around more literary weight, drank too much, caused scenes in restaurants, and slept with movie stars. Alas, sweetheart, lowest-ranking PhD candidate ...

Describe your latest book.
My latest book is a short story collection called Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Many of the stories are about monstrous metamorphoses — teenaged bullies in New Jersey, captive Japanese women converted into factory machinery, vampires in recovery. Human subjects converted into objects by violence.

What fictional character would you like to date, and why?
I'd like to date Bone from Russell Banks's Rule of the Bone. Provided that I, too, were 14 years old — it would be a little Mary Kay Letourneau to date him now, at age 31. Maybe Russell Banks will write a sequel where Bone is an adult man on a Jamaican schooner and suitable as an imaginary love interest? Because I love that character. His put-on swagger and his anger and his complete vulnerability.

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
For several years I worked as a receptionist at a veterinary clinic in New York City, a job I really loved and repeatedly failed at. At first I'd considered training as a vet tech, before it was revealed to me that none of my love ...

Describe your latest book.
Days That I'll Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono is a personal memoir in which I tell the story of how my own life and the lives of John Lennon and Yoko Ono intersected over a period of 45 years. Ever since I met them in London in 1968, I was fortunate to have been able to interview both of them at a number of significant moments in their lives, and my book uniquely focuses on John and Yoko as coequal partners both in life and in art — the two halves of one sky.

In 1968, I did the first extensive interview with John after he and Yoko had become lovers and collaborators. John would later remark to me that "Yoko is the most famous unknown artist — everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does"; and in 1970, with his encouragement and participation, I wrote one of the first in-depth profiles of Yoko in which I described her extraordinary life and explored her often-misunderstood work as a filmmaker, poet, singer-songwriter, and pioneer of performance and conceptual art. And ...

Describe your latest work.
My new young adult Finishing School series, set in the same world as the Parasol Protectorate only 25 years earlier, features a lady's seminary located in a giant caterpillar-like dirigible floating over Dartmoor in which young ladies are taught to finish everything — and everyone — as needed. There will be steampunk etiquette. There will be well-dressed espionage. There will be Victorian fake food. There will be flying mechanical sausage dogs named Bumbersnoot. The first book, Etiquette and Espionage, releases on February 5.

If someone were to write your biography, what would be the title and subtitle?
Let It Steep: Chronicles of a Wierdo between Tea Breaks

How did the last good book you read end up in your hands, and why did you read it?
These days I'm really into rereading some of my past favorites. It's like visiting old friends. I just went back to Sorcery and Cecelia, a deliciously fun and very polite romp by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer.

Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
Not unless you count going to Boston Worldcon to meet Tamora Pierce.

Describe the best breakfast ...

Describe your latest book.
My latest book — that is, my latest completed book — is Heat. Heat, simply put, is about all things hot. It is a natural sequel to my book Cold, really just a march up the thermometer from where Cold left off. But what a topic! It is warm bloodedness and fever, the first appearance of fire on earth, cooking, climate change, fuels like wood and peat and coal and oil, historical figures like Galileo Galilei and Mark Twain and Charles Dickens and Captain James Cook, volcanoes, the sun, and the beginning of the universe. And it is a topic that let me wander in places I would have otherwise missed — ambling ill-equipped into deserts, stepping across recently hardened lava just inches above the earth's inner red glow, and walking barefoot over burning coals. It bound me to scientists like Faraday and Lavoisier and Tyndall. It gave me an excuse to taste crude oil and a reason to hike 70 miles to a site once coveted by Edward Teller, father of the ...