Into THIN AIR!

THIN AIR – Appearance/book-signing in Flagstaff - November 14th!

Interviewers always ask, "How has your life changed, now that you're a best-selling author instead of a scientist?" My impulse is usually to answer, "Well…now I write books instead of doing research or teaching classes. You know…duh." Being a naturally polite person (no, really. I mean, usually…well, if I'm not worn to a frazz on a book tour, at least…) and understanding that thinking up good interview questions is not the easiest thing in the world to do, so far I haven't done this.

In fact, my life has changed a lot (well, look, I've lived more than half a century; naturally it's going to change; everybody's does), but the details are by and large either too complicated or too boring to make a good answer.

One of the ways in which it's changed, though, is that I now have the opportunity to consort with all kinds of Really Interesting People, and to be involved in all kinds of entertaining projects, beyond the limits of just the stuff I personally write.

One of these entertaining projects (staffed by Really Interesting People ) is Thin Air. This is the literary magazine produced, edited, and published by an enterprising (and most creative) group of students at Northern Arizona University. (NAU is my old alma mater, in Flagstaff—which is 7000 feet above sea level. "Thin air," geddit?)

I have the honor to be "consulting editor" for this excellent magazine—which basically means that I help support their printing costs and drop by now and then to talk with the staff and hear all about the neat things they're doing.

On one recent visit to NAU, I was invited to visit an advanced Creative Writing seminar to talk about graphic novels: what they are (this being a college class, they already knew that), how they're put together, what a script looks like, how collaboration with the artist works, what the business side (contracts, etc.) is like, and so on. Well, the editor-in-chief of Thin Air was part of this class, and asked whether I'd be willing to do an interview for the magazine, covering some of the high points of this presentation. Sure, I said.

Well, you know how one thing sort of leads to another? (Or at least it certainly does around here…) We ended up with what I think is probably an interesting interview, illustrated not only with a page of my working script, but with the "pencil page" (the preliminary sketch) of the artwork for that page, and the finished (not necessarily final; there's always tweaking) full-color art of the same page (page 48, I think. It's part of the scene where Claire tends Jamie's shoulder on the road and he tells Dougal to find him a clean shirt and take the lassie off his chest). Many thanks to Hoang Nguyen, the artist, and Betsy Mitchell, the Ballantine editor, for letting us use these!

In addition to the interview, I'll also be doing a fund-raising appearance for the magazine at Northern Arizona University on November 14th. This will be in the afternoon—3:00 PM—and I'll be talking (about graphic novels, to start with, though I imagine other things will be talked about, and I'll certainly be reading a few bits of this and that—excerpts from AN ECHO IN THE BONE, that sort of thing…) for a couple of hours and signing books. (Books will be available for sale there, but you're certainly welcome to bring your own for signing, if you'd like.)

For more details—or to order tickets for the talk—or to order a copy of the magazine itself—
go to www.thinairmagazine.com . And I'll see you in Flagstaff in two weeks!