Greg van Eekhout Quotes.
More than working toward the book’s climax, I work toward the denouement. As a reader and a writer, that’s where I find the real satisfaction.
Being part of the original Star Wars generation, I have always known a dark future.
‘California Bones’ is the first volume in my trilogy about Daniel Blackland, a wizard trying to survive in a world that eats wizards. It’s a book about friends and family, trust and betrayal, the love of power and the power of love.
As a reader, I tend not to get too much from tales of unrelenting grimness.
In high school, I stole a six-foot submarine sandwich from a banquet room in front of several hundred people. I did it because I was in marching band, and we were promised food if we played, and they broke their promise. It was my first and only heist, motivated by justice and hunger.
I feel lucky that my career so far has included books for adults and books for kids. They’re equally important to me, and I hope I get to continue writing both.
I don’t think that eating bones is necessarily gruesome unless you’re a vegetarian.
In everything I write, I’m always striving to hit the right mix of light and darkness, humor and pain, fun and seriousness.
If ‘Star Wars’ wasn’t enough to prepare me for a dark future, there was the ‘Planet of the Apes’ franchise, conveniently repeated for me in Los Angeles on KABC’s Channel Seven 3:30 movie. Apes enslaving humans! Mutants with boils and an atom bomb! Ape riots in Century City! They killed baby Caesar’s parents!
It’s possible I’m a weird person, you know, and if I could only write for people who are like me, I wouldn’t have any audience at all. Ultimately, I’m my audience. I’m writing stories for myself. I don’t have kids of my own, and I don’t hang around kids all that much. Maybe that puts me at a disadvantage.
The stakes in my books tend to be kind of ridiculously high. In ‘Kid vs. Squid,’ the question is whether or not the California coast will be subsumed by the ocean in favor of the creation of a new Atlantis. In ‘The Boy at the End of the World,’ what’s at stake is the survival of the human species.
There’s a certain amount of world-building that I hold off on until I need it for the story. World building in advance isn’t really my thing, maybe because I didn’t grow up playing RPG’s.
