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...much of a mental shift is involved in starting a new character that you think is going to be the foundation of a new series? How much of a character's life do you know at the outset...
...very important for me to not read crime fiction, actually. Plots in good crime fiction are so insidious that they get into your head and you don't even know that they're there. I was once writing a book - I forget which one it was, it was one of the Easy Rawlins ones - I was way more than halfway through when I realized, "This is very familiar to me." I'm talking to myself, saying "Well, of course it is, you just wrote it." And then I said, "No, it's familiar for some other reason." And then...
...People were saying, "You're going to name a black character Leonid? How can you do that?" And I'd say, "Why not? Does it make any more sense to call him John? I mean, if black people came from Africa, I should give my characters African names, you know?" But as a writer, as a novelist, names help to identify a character, and place a character in the world...
...still don't know it. I just finished this morning the first chapter of the third Leonid McGill book. And I'm still learning about him. And I will be learning about him until I come to the last book, which I think will be number ten. And if I wrote an eleventh, I would find out even more about him. That gets back to the whole notion of character development. I see each book as a novel, but then I see the whole series as a novel - one big long novel. And so the character is always growing...
Politicians, like poker players, know the importance of keeping a straight face. Even when they're holding the feeblest of hands, they have to ensure that their opponents never know how close they are to folding. But in the epic poker match between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou over a potential European Union bailout of debt-ridden Greece, who is the real deal and who is bluffing...